That is how the format for the 2020 ICC T20 World Cup works.

The top 8 teams have been granted automatic entry to the Super-12 stage. The remaining 4 teams comes from qualification phase, and this phase includes a total of 8 teams (Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and 6 teams from the T20 World Cup Qualifier 2019) . I am not sure why you are so surprised about it. Even during the last T20 world cup, the format was the same (back then, it was Super-10 instead of Super-12).

When the direct qualification slots were decided, Sri Lanka was ranked 9th as per the official ICC T20 rankings, and therefore missed the slot. Bangladesh was ranked 12th. On the other hand, Afghanistan was ranked 7th and they gained direct entry.

Afghanistan is ranked 7th as per the ICC T20I rankings, but their ranking for the other two formats are not that good. They have a few players who have excelled in the T20 format during the past few years, such as Rashid Khan, Mujeeb ur Rahman and Mohammed Nabi. Playing in the T20 leagues around the world has definitely helped the Afghan players.

SriLanka are confirmed to be playing in T20 Worldcup next year however SriLanka and Bangladesh will play in the group stage of the tournament.
You can read the details here. https://www.icc-cricket.com/media-releases/963607

Even if we see in this prospective, the Srilanka and Bangladesh can easily outclass the last four teams out of eight. Do you think these two teams will fail to even reach the top 4 when playing against the non-test playing nations ?

In reality, it will be only the competition of the two teams who would qualify along with SriLanka and Bangladesh.

England had a complete change in the team structure after these losses and with the team they have right now there is no way that any associate nations will defeat them, earlier they had a really good Test team but had a much weaker ODI and T20 players but now things have changed and i accept that T20 is anyone's game at a given day.

Tomorrow we have Australia facing Srilanka, anyone expecting any upset, i am going with Australia to win the match looking at the dominance they had in the first T20.

I wanted to place a bet for Netherlands to place a bet and the betting odds were decent but i have seen UAE playing well in some matches and with these teams you never know how they will perform as i have not seen all of their matches nor do i know their top players but i know Netherlands have some good players with experience but consistency is the problem, there is no way UAE could win the match with a low score like this.

After the suspension of those players UAE got defeated easily by Oman and then i thought they will be loosing all the matches but that was not the case as they won the very next game against Ireland then defeated Hong Kong and the only loss was against Jersey after that so i was not sure how they will perform as one day they will perform well enough to win but on bad days they perform terribly as we saw today and that is the reason i did not wage a bet.

Namibia and Netherlands secured their spot in the next years T20 world cup and this is the first time i am seeing qualifiers being more public as i never noticed these qualifying matches being talked about in previous world cup editions but i am yet to wage a bet in any of the matches as i am watching these matches live.

Tomorrow we have the second T20 between Australia and Srilanka, i am expecting another domination by Australia but the odds are not that great for the match.

So with about 30 mins to go for the match, I'd like to put up my predictions for the game!
The match is being played in Brisbane, one of the fastest pitch in the world, so we can expect the pitch to offer some bounce, hence helping the Aussies pacers a lot more to keep Lankan side in control.
Last game, Malinga started off well but eventually in his second spell, he got off-track with dropping in some poor deliveries which were optimised brilliantly by Maxwell's off cutters! Malinga would surely work on his mistakes this game, given his experience.
Mitchell Starc will be missing today's game for a family function and Billy Stanlake will be coming in the playing XI.
Taking into consideration the dominant performance by Australian batsmen previous game, and a pitch which strongly favours the Australian pacers, I am going to predict Australia as the winner for today's game! The level of gameplay of Australia is a huge gap ahead of Sri Lanka. I believe they will easily take this game and secure the series.