What is to be done with the Intercontinental Cup? It was a product of the best intentions but now creates more conundrums than it ever stood to solve.

Bob Woolmer's idea was to get associate countries used to playing multi-innings, multi-day cricket and fill what were then, in the early 2000s, yawning gaps in the calendar. Distantly, the grand plan was to make the Test-playing world a bigger place.

Five years down the line and almost a year since Woolmer's tragic demise, the concept has grown but its credibility is waning. Against Namibia, Canada and Bermuda this year, Scotland will rely heavily on second-string players and that news was no revelation. Last August, Ryan Watson was seven men down due to work commitments and summoned Neil MacRae and Steve Knox to open the batting cold against the double title-winning Irish. A week earlier, Scotland had thrashed a barely recognisable Dutch team.

Watson has implored the ICC to do something about it. The captain would have them make a remedial financial injection, but that will happen once the qualifiers for the 2011 World Cup are determined. If the Scots succeed in the UAE in the spring of 2009, there will be funds available to professionalise players; it is only a question of how many and for what portion of the year.

The 2007-08 Intercontinental Cup will be won by Ireland or Kenya, who have greater depth than they had in 2003, when Craig Wright's band won in Dublin then sauntered past a weakened Kenya, then Canada, in the Gulf. Even then, a pleasing achievement had a slight whiff of ambiguity about it, and the doubts linger. Scotland and UAE played three hours' cricket in four days in Ayr and the match was not deemed a washout but a draw, giving each team three points out of a possible 20.

Tony Cozier, the renowned West Indian cricket commentator, recently savaged the ICC's investment in this tournament but there is nothing flawed about the strategy. It's just that we should all accept the I-Cup for what it is.

The red-ball roadshow gets ambitious countries playing more cricket than they otherwise would. Most players love it because classically-trained batsmen can play correctly and bowlers can warm into a spell. For that reason the format should not be removed.

Unlike one-day cricket, it offers a measure of a player's true calibre. However, unlike the shorter format that defines associate cricket, four-day games do not put players on a pathway to any greater plain. So there is no point in pretending it has any profound value.

Woolmer, a traditionalist, hated the idea of new generations of cricketers being taught nothing but one-day skills. But he wasn't aware of the cultural and financial barriers to Test matches taking place outside the existing sphere.

Although I would love to be proved wrong, I have yet to be convinced that Test cricket could ever be sustainable in Scotland. There would have to be a massive sea-change in the public funding the sport receives and the money it can make from spectator levels, which takes you down the road of hypothetical demographics. Let's not get started on the climate.

One-day internationals, though, and Twenty20s? Bring them on. Already there is a proven market here and Scotland have not yet beaten a major nation or staged a gripping cilffhanger under a hot sun, the two things that would bring people back.

The ICC and the associates should be channelling all their energies into improving one-day skills to ensure Ireland's Caribbean feat is not a one-off. So let Scotland A – all four-day specialists now, by the way - take care of the first-class stuff and make sure the master blasters grasp every 50-over and 20-over opportunity that is going.

Watson has scored 750 runs in the Intercontinental Cup and they will go down on his first-class record. But he will never, ever play in a Test match, so the experiment has no relevance to the original premise.

This article first appeared in the December 2007 edition of the Scottish Cricketer.