SPORTS journalists whistle as they work because one day, if they play their cards right, a powerful club or governing authority might see fit to ban them from a stadium.

In these touchy times it is the only badge of honour worth having in my trade, and I am not being facetious here – in 95% of cases the sanction comes as a direct result of good journalism, either in the form of critical analysis or a scoop that the hierarchy did not want to slip out.

Similarly, I have come to regard parody accounts on Twitter as a must-have for sports administrators, whose duties are so tedious and so far removed from the fun of sport itself that it must come as a blessed delight when their personal endeavours are promoted in this congratulatory way.

Roddy Smith is “Roddy Smyth” on Twitter, and his alias describes his duties as “separating the wheat from the chaff, bit by bit, day by day”. I have no idea who is behind the ruse but there was an amusing entry soon after Smith announced his resignation.

“Who fancies a league reconstruction before I finish up?” asked Mr ‘Smyth’, adding the hashtags “#rocktheboat”, “#timeforachange” and “#loveit”.

It would be some individual who ran a sport for 10 years and didn’t make a single enemy along the way. In my experience, people who take on these positions fare best when they find a middle ground between being loved and being hated. The gentle demonisation of Roddy Smith suggests that his work cast him into that safe middle ground.

Serious assessments of the performance of the outgoing chief executive of Cricket Scotland are fraught with difficulty. He leaves the organisation in a far stronger position than in which he found it, which is a good start, and yet, from another angle, it could be viewed that Scottish cricket has gone nowhere under his charge.

This is largely because, in a decade of change like none that preceded it, Ireland overtook Scotland as cricket’s most vibrant associate nation and pulled away. His various coaching appointments did not work out and Smith will never know what he could have achieved had the national team created a head of steam for him to work with. Warren Deutrom’s experience offers a tantalising glimpse, though.

I spoke to Roddy on the phone last week to informally gauge his mood. If you can cast your mind back as far as 2004, he was the right man at the right time. Gwynne Jones, his predecessor, had applied himself to the role with an ambition that did not match his attention to detail and he had seen something flamboyant about this office, a misjudgement which irritated too many people who were working much harder for less.

The appointment of Smith ticked all the boxes. A former cricketer with experience of playing for club and country, nobody was sure quite what his job at sportscotland had involved but the same could be said of most people on the payroll at the funding quango. To use an appropriate analogy, Scottish cricket needed a safe pair of hands but they needed the new custodian to be able to bat a bit too. Everything about the broad-shouldered Smith said solid and dependable.

Looking back, he recalls the mess he inherited at Cricket Scotland’s Mary Erskine Academy headquarters in Edinburgh and views the organisation he will leave at Christmas as “unrecognisable”.

“We were technically insolvent the day I walked in the door,” says Smith. “Since then our turnover has gone from £450,000 to over £2million, we now have 25 full-time staff and 60 people on the payroll.”

In those early days it was all about consolidating responsible governance and building up cash reserves. The only reserves of interest to Jones had been the star players he wanted to be struggling to find a place in the Saltires team. Cricket Scotland has since become a shining star in the ICC galaxy, scooping any number of development awards. And yet, ask anybody who inhabits the Test world and they will struggle to name a Scottish cricketer. That is a mark of how badly the team have been left behind in the credibility stakes by the Irish, at the last two World Cups and in too many uneven head-to-head meetings. Smith was never able to surf the wave of a big victory.

The former Aberdeenshire player has made his mistakes, I am sure, and it is arguable that Cricket Scotland became a little too conservative under his stewardship. But it is unarguable that the day the 2005 ICC Trophy winners were unjustly drawn to play Australia and South Africa in the 2007 World Cup was a high water mark for Craig Wright’s (briefly) all-conquering Scotland team. It condemned them to a watery grave in the Caribbean, where the opportunistic Irish spotted a life buoy and paddled off into the sunset.

“You can’t expect to always be on top for 10 years. Teams mature, they peak, and players retire,” is how Smith explains the dramatic descent in Scotland’s stock as a national side under his leadership. That situation has improved, and Scotland under Grant Bradburn, Wright and Paul Collingwood could be young and fearless and hungry enough to break the country’s World Cup duck in New Zealand this winter. But the challenge for Smith’s successor is to figure out where on earth we go after that.

“It’s a double-edged sword,” says Smith when confronted with the myopic ICC decision to cut the number of teams involved the World Cup to 10 from 2019. India, Australia and England now purport to run the game because they generate the most money, and what can you say? That money is the reason Smith has 25 full-time staff.

“Scottish cricket would be nowhere without ICC funding, and actually the move towards a meritocratic pathway is what many of us in the associate and affiliate membership had been asking for,” he says. “But it is getting harder to break that ceiling.”

Smith sees more money coming the way of progressive cricket nations like Scotland, with the renegotiation of that bloated TV deal due in 2016. He welcomes the fact that Bangladesh and Zimbabwe are no longer protected, even though the ICC seems to be doing everything in its power to make sure they do both qualify for World Cups by allowing them to host the next two qualifiers.

He mentions the World Twenty20 Qualifiers that are taking place here next summer, but that wee gala won’t stop the summer months from feeling eerily quiet at national level, and it is a pity that we don’t get around to talking about the elephant in the room.

Scottish cricket's problems are not dissimilar to Scotland's as a nation. Being junior partners in an uncomfortable union is not a great recipe for long-term happiness. Smith tried to keep in with the England and Wales Cricket Board when Cricket Ireland strode out on their own. The deal was that Scotland would continue to play in county cricket and England would continue to visit. You might notice that only half of that deal still stands.

In a nutshell, Ireland wanted to have a shot at being a country but Scotland were happy to continue pretending to be one, and the result is a feeling of helpless dependency.

Roddy Smith will be remembered as the man who watered the garden in the right places to allow Scottish cricket to grow. But for all the green shoots, there is no sign of a beanstalk.

Within the wider perimeters of Scottish sport, cricket has not flourished, with no support base cultivated and no fertile soil for marketable competitions to develop that could ever allow the game to pay for that full-time squad by itself. Club cricket seems to exist in a strange continuum where the only constant is change, but on that scene you are never going to please all of the people all of the time.

In conclusion, as chief executive of Cricket Scotland Roddy Smith neither impressed me nor depressed me enough to hail him or hate him. He was the right appointment at the time and he leaves a neat and tidy garden behind him. There is room for improvement, but I am not confident that we will get it. It would be bordering on fantasy to expect any administrator to take a sport from soil to stratosphere in a decade. Even one who has a parody account on Twitter.