Actually it is not Ireland and Afghanistan are making their survival difficult. Ireland is in very poor form ever since they got the test status in 2019, and even if they lose to these teams it can be justified by saying that they lost to test nations. But what about the recent defeats to African associates such as Namibia and Uganda? And also in the ODI World Cup qualifiers, they lost to Scotland and Netherlands. These sort of defeats triggers a lot of questions and the decision by ICC to keep the test status of Zimbabwe will look more and more unjustified with each passing day.
I think ICC don't have much options to choose from. There are 12 test teams at the moment including Zimbabwe and Ireland. Bangladesh has got test status in 2000 and in last 23 years they were not able to produce any good test results but they also have test status intact. West Indies and Sri Lanka are also down and out in test but they also have there test status. There are only 4 to 5 out of these 12 teams who have the capability to play test and give good performance rest are there to just fill the table.
I will tell you the ranking of every particular team that plays cricket, and the teams who are present in the top 1. On number 1 India had a place, and in this team, all the players were very well, this is the team that can win all the matches but cannot win the important match that decides the champions and from this thing, they were never won an ICC trophy from the last 10 years,
They won the last Champions trophy in the captaincy of Dhoni and after this Indian team has never won any ICC trophy, and the last ODI World Cup that they got was under the captaincy of Dhoni, and the last T20 World Cup they got, was also inside the Ms Dhoni's captaincy.