JULIAN Rey drops what he is doing – some maintenance on a mechanised roller – and crosses the boundary to offer a firm handshake and a smile. The very lynchpin of Helensburgh Cricket Club for about four decades, he never once stops smiling as he talks plainly about the difficulties of trying to keep a club afloat in a town with a transient population.

Jules, 70, was chairman of the club for years, and on any given day in summer you would drive past and see him working on the wicket. He has passed on that duty now but it is obvious that he still does pretty much everything else, and the outfield looks lush and immaculate, the sightscreens – blown apart in the winter storms – erect and painted in perfect virginal white, the mobile nets intact and the scorer’s hut, my father’s old cubby hole, smart and impenetrable.

The very embodiment of volunteerism, Jules was last year awarded a British Empire Medal in the Queen’s Awards. But he is not Superman and everything he has done to maintain standards cannot stretch to playing standards. Ardencaple looks terrific, and tomorrow night several of us old boys will turn up for a hit and a beer and enjoy the reunion while feeling rueful about having left it all behind.
When I was a kid, in the early 1980s, Helensburgh were champions of the Glasgow League, the forerunner of the Western Union back in the days when the only clubs operating at a higher level were the Scottish counties.

Most of the heroes of that vintage passed on their tricks and their experience to us as we came through the junior ranks and eventually joined them in the senior team, but as a unit – for all the school scalps and club honours and district camps and national caps we accrued individually - we didn’t come close to matching their achievements at senior level.

Still, it was a time of stellar progress for the club which included an appearance in the Scottish Small Clubs Cup Final. Helensburgh, alas, are no longer a force in regional terms, albeit they have won two of their four completed matches so far this season, and my father’s updates in all the years I was away were more often delivered in sombre tones than his trademark enthusiasm. Hence the guilt.

There is a compelling reason for the reunion. Two compelling reasons, in fact. My dad was, like Julian, a lynchpin of Helensburgh until he died suddenly 18 months ago. This is to be the second Richard Coates Memorial Trophy match between Helensburgh CC and Lomond School, a concept drawn up Alister Minnis, deputy head at my alma mater. There would have been no cricket at Lomond during our time if not for Dr Martin Everett, the head of English who ran a game in the gym every Friday after school and arranged summer fixtures against the best schools in Scotland and beyond, ferrying us there and back in the minibus, running the team and umpiring. The embodiment of volunteering.

We were blessed. Our development was hailed and supported in parallel by the club and the school and cultivated by coaches of the highest calibre when the district selectors began to notice a surge of talent coming out of the town at the end of the train line. But, for one reason or another, it wasn’t sustainable. There are still many excellent and committed players at the club, but never since has there been the marriage of a bounty of emerging talent and Faslane-based servicemen that brought strong competition for places in not just the first XI but the second XI.

All the feelings I have for HCC extend to club cricket in Scotland as a whole. I stopped playing for Helensburgh when I started to get work on Saturdays as a football reporter, and I have scarcely had a weekend off since. It was my extraordinarily good fortune that Scottish cricket began to grow at the top end during my early days in journalism, and so covering Scotland became another reason not to play for Helensburgh. I can imagine how this might look, but it’s a job, as well as a privilege, to cover international sport, and increasingly the job has to come first. For a change, over the next week, I will be more involved in club cricket than international cricket, as I will be playing at Ardencaple and not covering Scotland v Netherlands at Titwood. And such is the way the planet revolves...

Driving past Ardencaple now induces an overpowering sense of guilt, just like my frequent admissions over the years that I could tell you everything you needed to know about a Scotland international unless it related to the club where he learned to play. It might sound like a lame excuse, but I have always maintained that club cricket is no place for the half-hearted, and there just hasn’t been the time to apply the necessary devotion to get back involved. Even now that I live two miles from the ground where I learned to bat, bowl, field, umpire and score, a young family and a demanding job with anti-social hours mean that playing or watching cricket is utterly inconceivable.

The humbling thing is that, as we catch up, Julian Rey understands all of this; I don’t even need to need to offer a word of explanation. I have never, in fact, encountered a single suggestion that I or my brother or any of our peers should have done more for the club that did so much for us.

And so to the game. Just as I am beginning to feel slightly less remorseful about swanning back into the club for one night only, Julian tells me that his wife is in hospital this week, and that he might not be there for the game, but not to worry, the ground will be in tip-top condition. I am mortified, embarrassed and, above all, gratified to know such a man. Here’s to Jules, to Dr Everett and to the old fella who should be scoring.