IN my younger days I was something of a cricketing all-rounder: couldn’t bat, couldn’t bowl and couldn’t field. At least I was consistent. My local club was Kelburne in Paisley and, despite the twin impediments of a lack of talent and a refusal to wear glasses to counter eyesight so poor that even a bat would have been embarrassed, I stuck at it for the best part of six or seven years. Going to university and then suffering the consequences of rather carelessly careering through a glass door helped bring this stunningly inglorious career to an end.

It was fun while it lasted, though. This being Paisley my team-mates were an eclectic bunch. My younger brother played, as did two of my pals from school who are still turning out for the team now in their 40s. Two of the Kelburne alumni, in particular, however, stick out. One was Gregor Maiden, a short, skinny ginger-haired kid a few years younger than the rest of us who would go on to play for Lancashire and Scotland. The other was a fellow called John Smeaton who would “set aboot” the opposition with his gentle, medium-paced bowling years before he was getting stuck into terrorists at Glasgow Airport.

John was a quiet guy, often to be found out the back of the pavilion smoking a fag, making his subsequent garrulous appearance in front of the TV cameras after that dramatic day all the more remarkable. It was the most I had ever heard him speak.

Malcolm Cannon listens to this story and rolls his head back and laughs. It perfectly epitomises the picture he has been trying to portray. Cricket Scotland’s CEO is not a man with a long-standing background in the sport but it did not take him long to deduce that, in trying to grow the game in this country, he must first tackle its image problem.

There is a widely-held view that cricket is a stuffy English game. Cannon knows that’s not the case and Smeato is the perfect example of that, a working-class guy who took no notice of other people’s prejudices because he just wanted to play.

Cricket was the game England took to the colonies but, as was the case with football, it has evolved and grown to blend into its surrounds. The kids chasing a makeshift ball around the slums of Mumbai or the dusty streets of Kingston paint a picture vastly different to the stereotype of the genteel English village greens. But it is still cricket, in its purest and rawest forms.

Scotland has a healthy cricket scene, too but at times it can feel like an underground movement, as if to mention it too loudly would be to invite scorn from the sort of people who would growl at someone ordering a lager shandy. The job of Cannon and others is to try to move away from that and try to take cricket further into the mainstream.

On a nice summer’s day it is one of the great spectator sports. The sun shone on Edinburgh last weekend and a few thousand folk descended on the Grange club to watch Scotland try to win their second successive match against Zimbabwe. Barring the small group rather loudly discussing their preferences for the next Tory leader, it was far from an elitist gathering.

Joined by a smattering of Zimbabwean supporters, young and old, black and white, who offered their side regular vocal encouragement, the rest of the crowd was made up of a cross-section of Scottish society; a few groups of lads out for a day on the beers, couples, families, and the odd cricket anorak marking every dot ball into their scorebook.

During the lunch break the teams went off and the Kwik Cricket plastic stumps came on to the pitch, giving hundreds of kids the chance to have a bat and bowl themselves. It was not difficult to see the appeal of the day out, the only shame that Scotland didn’t win the match.

This week’s developments ought to represent a further step towards shedding any lingering negative images about cricket’s old school image after the International Cricket Council (ICC) welcomed their first new full member, Test-playing nations since 2000.

One is Ireland, perhaps the only country to have a bigger chip on its shoulder than Scotland about living in England’s shadow. If the Irish can park their prejudices to fully embrace cricket, in a country that also has Gaelic sports vying for attention, then there is no reason why we can’t do likewise.

The other new entrant was Afghanistan, a nation that has somehow emerged from war and conflict to create a cricket side capable of competing with the best. It makes other excuses for failure seem somewhat hollow.

Football will always be Scotland’s favourite sport but there is no reason why others like cricket can’t gain greater prominence, too. It has the Smeato seal of approval after all.