Maybe my eyes were missing the signs, but as thousands of spectators participated in the opening ceremony at the Olympic Games in Beijing last month, enthusiastically banging the drums and waving the flags that had been so helpfully provided, then imitating the movement of doves with their flapping hands, China did not resemble a nation pining for cricket. Then again, any country that can go from brutally cutting short a student demonstration to talking of “one dream, one world” in two decades can probably find within itself a capacity for mastering even the most arcane and least adaptable of sports. That is what the ICC is hoping, at any rate.

China is the holy grail for sports administrators and cricket is no exception. This week, like an old imperialist poring over a map and carving up the possibilities, David Morgan, the president of the ICC, handed the responsibility for China to his principal adviser, Inderjit Singh Bindra. “We have already made great strides in developing the game in China,” Morgan said. “With Inderjit now joining us we have the chance to take the game in China to a new level.” Off you go, mate, bring back the spoils and try not to upset the natives along the way.

Bindra came over all enthusiastic: “China has huge potential for growth and we will explore ways of ensuring cricket is able to get a secure foothold within the country,” he said, sounding like Napoleon must have felt before setting off to conquer Russia. But China, like Russia, is an inhospitable place and it is likely that Bindra's army will suffer the same fate, falling well short of its target as the first snowfall of winter arrives.

There have been targets in China for a while and these have ebbed and flowed according to the success of the mission. When investment began in 2004 the idea was put forward that China would be good enough to qualify for the 2019 World Cup and achieve Test status by 2020. Now, mere exposure to the sport is the aim: 60,000 by 2012, the Chinese Cricket Association says, rising to 150,000 by 2020, fuelled by cricket's presence in the Asian Games in Guangzhou in 2010.

At the heart of these optimistic targets is cricket's desire to globalise and China's capacity for change, renewal and, in particular, the belief that, when the Chinese set their hearts on something, nothing can stop them. This is, after all, a country that won its first Olympic gold medal in the 1984 Games. But even if China wants to take cricket to its bosom, the fate of the China men's football team at the Olympics should sound a cautionary note: that when it comes to team sports that rely on a degree of instinct and lateral thinking, China's “training methods” are not that successful.

Two defeats and a draw against mighty New Zealand prompted an unusual degree of criticism, so much so that, according to two Chinese journalists, the Central Propaganda Agency ordered main news organisations to cease carping. This did not stop Li Weifeng, who captained the team to defeat by Brazil: “We play soccer like the Brazilians play ping-pong,” he said (which provoked another round of criticism from the Chinese coach of the Brazilian ping-pong team.)

China bends its knee to no one where individual pursuits such as diving, weightlifting and shooting are concerned, but it has not yet got the team thing. The Asian Cricket Council's website indicates where the mission to inculcate “shen shi yun dong” (“the noble game”) into the hearts and minds of the Chinese stands: against a population of 1,321,851,888, it lists zero turf pitches, zero cricket clubs, four cricket grounds and a blank next to the name of the national captain.

There are 153 coaches who have a “Level 1” certificate, which allows them “to assist more qualified coaches developing aspects of coaching under direct supervision”, but there is no information on how many better-qualified coaches there are to supervise them. Still it is good to know, under “recent achievements”, that China won the Global Development Awards photo of the year in 2005, a sweet, staged picture of three Chinese children playing soft-ball cricket on the Great Wall of China.

The push into China is part of a wider drive for globalisation, as if the ICC believes that the sport cannot be successful unless it is constantly stretching the boundaries, despite the problems closer to home. Enormous sums are spent on development - $13million (about £7.3million) from the ICC coffers last year alone, alongside the $300million that was pledged in July for the next seven years. Yet figures recently released suggest that the rewards for such investment are often meagre. In Kenya, for example, the numbers of senior cricketers has fallen in the past five years.

This is unsurprising. Cricket's great expansion came in colonial times. It was a point of contact between the colonisers and the colonised, offering a vehicle for the missionary zeal of those spreading British values and a focus for those determined to resist them. Without that extra spice, it is just another sport.

Cricket-watching may be a popular pastime in China in 2020, as it is now. For the uninitiated, cricket fighting is a hugely popular sport in China - the champion insects are given almost royal treatment - fuelling a passion for gambling. No sum of money spent by a sport intent on spreading its wings is likely to change the fact that by 2020 the participants will still be of the six-legged kind.

Too shy to be a genius, but nothing modest about Hick's record

"Come and watch this, I'm watching genius at work.” And with those words from Neil Fairbrother, I was ushered on to the balcony to watch Graeme Hick in action. Genius means different things to different people, but to me it did not imply an ability to do something I could not, but an ability to do something that I could not conceive of doing.

In his slightly stiff-legged, stiff-armed, stiff-wristed style, there was something altogether too familiar about Hick, something altogether too English for me to feel that genius was at play. When I came to know him there was something quite English about his manner, too. He was shy in company, unfailingly polite and somewhat diffident about his talent.

That is not to say there was not an aura about him, especially in the early days, when his blade seemed broader than most and when he had the most gargantuan appetite at the crease. Fielding at slip to Hick in the late 1980s in county cricket, your hands and fingertips became tense because you knew what a dropped catch could mean.

But there was little of the swagger or the ego that accompanies the latest England batsman to have been born on the African continent. These qualities, so alien to Hick, might have been a useful accompaniment as a buffer to all the expectation that he had to contend with when he finally made his international debut against West Indies in 1991. Not too many other England players make their debuts after they have written an autobiography, appeared on Wogan and scored a quadruple century in first-class cricket.

That is the problem with high expectation - it is so difficult to live up to and, if you do not, the perception is that you have failed. I am not sure how a man who played 65 Test matches and 120 one-day internationals, who has scored more than 40,000 first-class runs and 136 first-class centuries can be perceived to be a failure, but there you are; that is the problem with expectation.

Sometimes the finger is pointed in my direction for an example of the kind of supposedly uncaring environment that stifled Hick's run-making at the highest level, as if declaring with a man on 98 could ruin him. It was an uncomfortable moment and not one that I would happily relive, but yesterday I looked up Hick's Test record in the period that I was captain. He averaged a shade more than 40 - not the stuff of genius, but of a damn good player.

On Tuesday, as he announced that his time was up, he did so in a manner that was fitting: without rancour and with a good deal of emotion and affection for time well spent in the bucolic surroundings of Worcestershire. It is easy to forget just how long Hick, 42, has been pummelling bowlers but, when he started, Neil Kinnock had just been elected leader of the Labour Party, the United States was just about to invade Grenada and, in the land of his birth, Zimbabwe, inflation was running at 11,268,743 per cent lower than it is today.