Jon Coates April 2015

IT IS late on Saturday night, April 25, 2015, and the Scottish cricket season has begun. Yet it also feels like the beginning of an end.

Today was the opening day of the Eastern Premiership season and CricketEurope has published a report of Aberdeenshire’s winning start to their title defence.

Well-presented scorecards and a table are available on Cricket Scotland’s official website. This is great. And I mean that. Club cricket feels relatively vibrant in Scotland - a sunny April always helps - and we know that the game is healthy according to the reckoning of development and participation.

But what, pray tell me, is the point of a national governing body that develops cricketers to raise the standard of the club scene, to become strong role models and go on to play professionally in England, possibly even for England, if there is no such thing as international cricket in Scotland?

For many years of my journalism career I planned my summer around when and where, and against whom, Scotland were playing cricket. They are not playing anybody, anywhere this summer, it seems.

The international section of the Cricket Scotland website refers to a qualifying tournament for a World Cup that is over and two long-running tournaments that ended in 2013.

May 2015 is almost upon us. This is not the fault of CS, perhaps. The ICC does seem to be dragging its feet over when exactly the second tier of world cricket will reopen for business. But what exactly will the leading associate nations be playing for when it does?

The 2019 World Cup is so far away as to feel like a pipe dream. And I’m not talking about the number of years that must pass before then but the distance the national side must travel if it is to overturn the qualifying advantage handed on merit to Ireland and Afghanistan and then deny a full ICC member its place at the finals in England in a qualifying equation that is certain to be stacked in the full member’s favour.

So we await the scheduling of the next World Cricket League Division 1 without bated breath. The next Intercontinental Cup should be interesting. I say this on the basis of spectator numbers for previous Intercontinental Cups, which were so low that the only way is up.

There was a frisson of excitement last year when the ICC appeared to open the door to Test cricket through the portal of the Intercontinental Cup. Again, this offer is contingent on more maybes than the SNP’s White Paper for Scottish independence.

In principle I support that notion but to get there we have to swim against a tide that is remote-controlled by people in London who would prefer to keep us exactly where we are.

It’s the same with the Terrible Ten in cricket, a phoney elite controlled by three members - India, England and Australia - who generate all the money and judiciously decide where it should be spent in order to grow their own hegemony.

Not for one day of my life have I believed that Test cricket is sustainable in Scotland, Ireland or the Netherlands, and I believe the sensible people who act as proponents for it are only doing so for two reasons: because they are instructed by tradition and snobbery to consider Test status to be the mark of a cricketing country that has made it, and because they are scared to try Plan B in case it fails, in which case the game really will be up.

Plan B is not one-day international cricket, the main currency of the associate economy, it is Twenty20 cricket. Properly-marketed T20 games in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen could be wonderful.

They could drive revenue both at the gate and through broadcast partnerships, introduce a new audience to cricket, revamp the sport’s image in the eyes of the media (as a sports editor scheduling coverage for the summer I am finding it very hard this year to put heart before head).

If I were taking charge of Cricket Scotland - and I can only assume they have made Willie Donald interim CEO because Roddy Smith’s office needed fundamental renovation work after he vacated it in December - I would look in the empty 2015 international filing cabinet and feel pretty smug that the only way is up.

I would also look at the qualifying tournament for the 2016 World Twenty20 and see opportunity that stretches far beyond qualification for a tournament in India that will not capture the imagination here.

These qualifiers are scheduled to be held in Scotland and Ireland in July and August 2015. It is staggering that on the brink of May this is all we know, but then the Irish don’t seem to be any better informed so it must be the ICC’s fault.

So watch this space.

Let’s give the benefit of the doubt to Cricket Scotland and believe that they might capitalise on this opportunity to showcase the talents of Kyle Coetzer, Calum MacLeod, Richie Berrington, Safyaan Sharif and Michael Leask and bring the tournament to a new audience, both at the turnstile and in the armchair.

But I do not pretend that any investment in such a tournament would include a guaranteed return. The weather in Belfast the last time the qualifiers came to these islands made the event something of a damp squib, even though the crowds weren’t bad.

It would be a gamble, and Cricket Scotland has not been renowned for taking those since Gwynne Jones had his hands on the tiller.

But if the governing body does not have urgent plans to introduce T20 to the national conscience, I would love to know what is the vision for Scottish international cricket.

If there is, indeed, such a thing as Scottish international cricket right now, I must have missed it while trawling the worldwide web tonight.

The World Cup was anti-climactic but it shouldn’t have been the end of the world.