Oliver hopes England visit will not be cricket zenith

KEITH Oliver's kind, craggy face is as well kent in Edinburgh legal circles as in the cork-and-willow environs where you will find him tomorrow, if you are attending cricket's summer showpiece.

The fear was, six years ago, that the amiable Borderer might be lost to both communities. But Oliver recovered from a serious illness to resume life at the helm of both his firm, Olivers WS, and Cricket Scotland, which he has served as chairman since 2002.

A professional change of direction – "it's just a different way of doing things," he says of the merger with HBJ Gateley Wearing earlier this year, which led to Olivers' founder taking up a post at Wearing's Canning Street headquarters – mirrors the kind of expansion he would like to see applied to Scottish cricket. This England match is a gala day which, like the Australians' visit last summer, dwarves the other 364 on the calendar.

Merging with a bigger neighbour, of course, is not an option – Scotland's autonomy was achieved as recently as 1992 – but in lieu of a smooth solution Oliver works his international contacts to make marginal gains wherever he can. A member of MCC and former chairman of the Lord's Taverners in Scotland, maintaining the Saltires' inclusion in professional county competitions has been on his agenda in recent years. Cracking the International Cricket Council's elite coterie of ten full members is a tougher task.

Cricket, in this reach of the old kingdom, has come a long way. A crowd of 3,600 will tomorrow watch England and Scotland contest a game of stature and status that was the material of daydreams 15 years ago. But is this it? Has the climb flattened into a permanent plateau?

Oliver has a rough idea – it is, in fact, about as precise as anyone's – of where the game is heading. What is accepted by most sensible observers is that Scotland could not sustain Test status if they were ever to gain it. The weather and the game's presence in the tramlines of the national conscience give five-day internationals little promise to excite accountants.

However, if the influence of the elements can be accepted as a manageable hazard, the kind of one-day international that will engage imaginations at Citylets Grange tomorrow – along with its even more profitable Twenty20 sibling – could become far more regular than annual.

As chairman, Oliver has occupied a role somewhere between the diplomatic gravitas of the presidency and the business binary of the chief executive's office, manned since 2004 by the respected Roddy Smith.

If anyone is going to push the game further up the mountain, it will be Smith and the legal eagle at his side, because they intimately know their environment. Oliver sees a process forming by which Scotland, and equally ambitious Ireland, can take steps towards membership of the elite. "We would be hopeful of benefiting from any constitutional changes that may or may not come about," says Oliver. "Test cricket is a possibility, but a much more realistic one is playing more one-day cricket against our peers and against the top nations as much as possible. Ireland are pursuing that with the ICC. There is no reason why we shouldn't be just as ambitious."

At present there are ten full members of the ICC; they all hold Test status. The Irish, who can identify with all of the reasons Test cricket in Scotland is unrealistic, have canvassed the governing body to promote them to a new level between full and associate membership where their team can play limited-overs games against the top ten all year round.

Our Celtic cousins knocked Pakistan out of the last World Cup, and they did the same to Bangladesh at the 2009 World Twenty20. They have been appreciably better than Scotland since 2005, but from the sorry nadir of failed World Cup qualification 14 months ago, the wait for another harvest of talent is almost over. Latent flames like Richie Berrington are developing into better players than Craig Wright's warriors ever were, as products of a more coherent system.

"Boys are coming through to the team, which you can see from this week's side in the Netherlands, and they are coming through together as a group," says Oliver, a governor of alma mater Fettes College, whose spires overlook the ground where Kevin Pietersen and Co will exert themselves tomorrow. "These things are cyclical and it is just unfortunate that we didn't perform in South Africa at the World Cup qualifiers, and when we did get to the World Cup (in 2007] we didn't perform.

"When you look at Ireland, it might be a little unfair to say they were lucky against Pakistan, but one lucky win and their world changed overnight, and they have never looked back."