The Beatles did it; Radiohead did it; even Duran Duran did it, although it proved to be beyond the Kinks, Oasis and Robbie Williams. The chimera of the ages for artists, that of conquering America, has occasionally infected cricket, too.

A combination of dreamers, chancers and fools have attempted to dispel the notion that the game is beyond the comprehension of Americans and now a businessman named Jay Mir, from an organisation called the American Sports and Entertainment Group, believes he can succeed where others, including most recently Allen Stanford, have failed.

Taking his cue from the success of the Indian Premier League template and having absorbed all the right lessons about the importance of hype over substance, Mir intends to organise an American Premier League of Twenty20 cricket in New York in October.

Games will be played at the stadium of a Minor League baseball team, the Staten Island Yankees, and he has signed up Sir Richard Hadlee as his principal ambassador, various retired players, including Graeme Hick and Adam Hollioake, the former England internationals, and some disaffected and out-of-pocket players from the struggling Indian Cricket League (ICL).

According to Mir, “the potential is massive” and “the response so far has been phenomenal ... much like our slogan ‘A Cricket Revolution in America.'” The response of the ICC has been much more muted, however, along similar lines as the governing body's reaction to the ICL: the embryonic American league remains very much outside of the official orbit and the threat of sanctions applies to anybody from within the game brave enough or foolish enough to get involved.

Only a year ago, welcoming the Stanford enterprise, Giles Clarke, the chairman of the ECB, described the American market as “one we have to see if we can develop”. Exploitation is fine, then, as long as the ECB or other official organisations are doing the exploiting. But, really, the ICC need not lose any sleep over Mir's enterprise. It may catch on among the South Asian and Caribbean immigrant populations of New York - which are, of course, significant - but there is no chance of the game infiltrating mainstream America.

Entrepreneurs are often so dazzled by imaginings of their own brilliance that they forget to look at history and reality becomes distorted by grandiose dreams. Just four years ago, you may or, more likely, you may not remember, American Professional Cricket was launched to great fanfare and consisted of an eight-team league playing - you guessed it - 20-over cricket.

Shivnarine Chanderpaul and Ramnaresh Sarwan were involved, although this sprinkling of West Indian stardust failed to ignite the tournament, even among the West Indian expatriates. The organisers announced at the start that they had three years' funding up front but, after a dispiriting first year of poor attendances, awful organisation and minimal media interest, the experiment quietly folded.

Whether Stanford had done his homework or whether he, too, was unhinged by his own genius remains unclear, but he fancied that he could crack America as well.

Stanford spent millions on marketing in a small town called Fort Collins in Colorado, investigating whether he could generate enthusiasm for a foreign game among a hitherto ignorant population. Door-to-door pamphleteering, billboards booming “You gotta see this!” and primetime exposure for his Caribbean Twenty20 tournament was just a small part of the experiment, the first step, supposedly, towards domination of the American family-orientated sporting market. “I want to share my love for the sport with America,” Stanford said. It was a love that went unrequited.

Entrepreneurs who look at the bottom line alone, who view sport through dollars-and-cents eyewear, forget that it is a cultural phenomenon first and foremost as well as a business. Cricket's lack of popularity in America has little to do with the length or complexity of the game - and there is always a faint whiff of anti-Americanism about the sneers that it is just too complex for them to understand - and more to do with the origins of baseball's remarkable story.

Cricket had its chance in America, but this was long before Mir, Stanford or any other sharp-eyed businessmen came along, dreaming of making millions by taking the game to new frontiers. In the 19th century it actually rivalled baseball for popularity and media interest and by 1850 there were cricket clubs in 22 states. But baseball's early protagonists marketed the game shrewdly as a truly American pastime, invented, they said (wrongly), by a hero of the Civil War.

The ultimate victory of baseball over cricket was part of the unstoppable tide of patriotism: a new game - democratic and classless - for a new nation. Cricket was damned by association and retreated to the margins, kept going, as it has been since, by Anglophiles and, more recently, those of Caribbean and Indian extraction.

By coincidence, Joseph O'Neill, the author of a fine novel partly about cricket in America, was at Lord's on Monday night for the Cricket Society and MCC's Book of the Year award, won by John Barclay, the former Sussex captain, for his whimsical memoir. One of the themes of O'Neill's book is the desire of one of the main characters, Chuck Ramkissoon, to develop a world-class cricket stadium in New York, a place where O'Neill has played for many years with the mainly South Asian and Caribbean expatriates.

O'Neill has described cricket as a metaphor for the boundaries of American perception and the abiding feeling after reading Netherland is that of cricket and cricketers as cultural outsiders in America. “Do you want a taste of how it feels to be a black man in this country?” says one of O'Neill's characters (before Barack Obama's victory), “then put on the white clothes of a cricketer. Put on white to feel black.”

Surrey state of affair for Chris Adams

Watching Surrey succumb meekly to Gloucestershire in Bristol on Sunday, the scale of the challenge facing their new cricket manager, Chris Adams, immediately became clear.

Whereas Gloucestershire were sparky in the field (you won't see a better catch this season than the one Chris Taylor took to dismiss Grant Elliott), Surrey were slovenly; where Gloucestershire executed the basics smartly, Surrey looked like a team bereft of leadership and ideas. Things were so bad that you almost pined for a return of the Surrey swagger of old.

Adams has put together a support staff of Surrey greats - Graham Thorpe, Martin Bicknell, Alec Stewart and Ian Salisbury - andif things do not pick up soon there will be a clamour for the old boys to come out of retirement. The ability or otherwise of these former stars to galvanise an outfit clearly short on confidence will be an enduring theme of the season at the Brit Oval.

Top-class players do not always make top-class coaches. John Bracewell, the Gloucestershire director of cricket, was a fine, combative player himself and he has also made his mark in coaching. He has taken a different route from Adams, keeping his backroom staff to more manageable proportions - if Jack Russell can ever be described as manageable.

Bracewell has never been the most popular of characters in his native New Zealand, where former greats such as Martin Crowe speak disparagingly of his time as coach of the national side. But it seems to me that his teams make the most of their resources and are always well drilled and motivated.

Good management is about shaking players out of their comfort zones, which is exactly what Bracewell does. It was strange that his name did not feature more strongly when England were looking to replace Peter Moores.