Eight days later Hick made his List A debut against the same opponents, batting one place lower still and making 16* in a game decided (in Zimbabwe's favour) on run rate.

For Worcestershire's Second XI he was impressive: he twice took five wickets in an innings, and a prolific sequence of 195, 0, 170 and 186 gained him a first-team debut against Surrey in the last match of the 1984 County Championship.

1986 also saw the 20-year-old Hick – newly capped by Worcestershire – become the youngest player to make 2,000 first-class runs in a season,[12] while in 1987, he was named as one of Wisden's five Cricketers of the Year.

However, Hick's next four innings totalled a mere 32, leaving him with the daunting task of making 153 runs in the last match of the month, against the touring West Indians at New Road.

In all that season he scored a career-best aggregate of 2,713 runs including ten first-class hundreds, matching the Worcestershire record set by Glenn Turner in 1970.

He was a great success, hitting ten centuries in all and averaging 63.61 in the former season and a startling 94.46 in the latter; in one game against Auckland he scored a first-class record 173 runs between tea and close of play.

By the time of his final matches for the England team in 2000–01, Hick had already spent one summer as captain of Worcestershire, a post which he held for three seasons (2000 to 2002 inclusive).

He began solidly enough, with two centuries and four fifties in his first 14 innings in all cricket, but in early June he broke his hand and was unable to play for six weeks.

2004, however, saw him return to form with a vengeance, his 1,589 first-class runs (at 63.56) his best aggregate since 1990 and the lowest of his four centuries being 158, and he was picked for the FICA World XI team in three one-day games against New Zealand in January 2005, these matches having List A but not ODI status.

By the time he became eligible, public interest in his seeming destiny as a great batsman for country as well as county was intense; David Lloyd was later to write that he doubted "any cricketer [had] ever come into the international game burdened by such impossible expectations".

"[34] Hick made his first appearances as an England batsman in a three-match One Day International series against West Indies, the first being played at Edgbaston on 23 May 1991.

Although this game is now more often remembered for the rain-related fiasco which left South Africa needing an impossible 22 runs from one ball, it was Hick's Man-of-the-Match-winning knock of 83 (in an innings where the second top score was 33) which made England's victory possible in the first place.

He also helped Worcestershire to win the 1994 NatWest Trophy, sharing an unbroken partnership of 198 with Tom Moody in the final against a Warwickshire side which had swept the board with all the other domestic honours that year.

Hick was surprised and hurt not to be allowed to reach his hundred: Alec Stewart wrote later that his teammates "couldn't believe" the decision, and he felt that it "cost [England] dearly".

Hick's injury and the declaration affair overshadowed what up to that point had been a somewhat mixed series as far as the Tests had been concerned: in his other five innings he had been dismissed cheaply three times, but he had also made 80 at Brisbane.

That winter's tour was to South Africa, and Hick made a superb hundred on the first day of the first Test at Centurion Park; Allan Donald later conceded that "he hammered us".

Back at Worcestershire, he scored unevenly: immediately after his being dropped by England he made 148 and 86 against Kent, but he then endured a run of ten innings in all cricket without making more than 30, before hitting 54 and 106 against Gloucestershire in the penultimate Championship game of the season.

In the event Hick did play in the country, but only as part of Worcestershire's own tour; he took six wickets in their match against a Matabeleland Invitation XI in what must have been a bittersweet experience.

Hick began the 1998 season slowly and was left out of the England team at the start of the year, but he responded with four hundreds in successive first-class innings in late May and early June.

A total of nine runs from three innings left his hopes of a place on the Ashes tour looking extremely shaky, but after two half-centuries in ODIs and then 107 in the one-off Test against Sri Lanka it seemed he might have done just enough.

Just before the first Test, however, Hick received an emergency call-up – officially as "reinforcement" rather than a replacement – as Atherton was in severe pain from a chronic back problem (ankylosing spondylitis).

[51] Hick ended up playing in four Tests, but he had a rather poor series overall, averaging 25, although his defiant 68 in a losing cause at Perth stuck in the memory and his 39 and 60 contributed significantly to England's 12-run win at Melbourne (even if Dean Headley's 6–60 was more remarked upon).

The 1999 World Cup was held in England, and after Hick's ODI achievements in Australia Allan Donald felt he would be the home team's danger man.

He failed badly in South Africa (averaging a desperate 12.40) and by the time the Zimbabwe leg of the tour began he had not reached 30 in nine successive innings, by far the worst run of his ODI career, but 87*, 13 and 80 (as well as an international career-best 5–33 in the last game) against the Zimbabweans rescued his winter.

On what was to prove his last winter tours for England, of Kenya, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, Hick played five Tests and six ODIs, but only twice were his contributions of real value.

[65] Jonathan Agnew felt his body language against Curtly Ambrose back in 1991 had been poor, and had almost invited his dismissal,[44] and Atherton wrote that if Hick had indeed failed to do justice to his talent, it was surely "down to a vital missing ingredient in his mental make-up".

[41] Waugh appears to link this 'missing ingredient' to his dominance in county cricket, stating that "prior to his Test debut his capacity to overcome hardship was never called upon".

"[69] Hick's ODI statistics are considerably better than his equivalent Test figures, and his eventual career average of 37.33 is higher than any of Gooch, Thorpe and Gower.

[70] In this form of the game, he could destroy even the best: Andrew Flintoff recalled an innings of 65 against Pakistan at Sharjah in 1999 when Hick "was murdering" the "seriously rapid" Shoaib Akhtar: "If he dropped short, he pulled him and if [he] bowled full, he was driven.

"[74] David Lloyd noted, not altogether with approval, that other players would rally around Hick protectively, and that "in Alec Stewart he had a man who would champion his cause endlessly".