An amazing journey

Adopt a Club is back and this time it has gone urban. From hundreds of entries and exhaustive research Three Caps in Essex has been chosen as TWC's second beneficiary. Rob Steen tells their story

Nassers, Ravis and Varuns are all very well but a Sachin playing for Essex and England? That is what I call symbolic. Sachin Vaja certainly has the right forename. He also bowls offspin, hardly an area of contemporary national expertise.

Yet not until that vigilant scout of underprivileged talent, the former Essex keeper Neil Burns, spotted him last year, when he was already 21, did Chelmsford become aware of Sachin. "I missed eight years because I was at the wrong club," he says, regret drowned by pride - pride in that invitation to play in the spinners-only match organised last summer by the ECB's enterprising spin guru, David Parsons; pride in this summer's semi-pro contract with Essex; but mostly pride in Three Caps CC, his nomadic, cash-poor, resource-light launch pad. And it was Sachin who had the idea to put the club up for adoption.

Three Caps have come a long way in 14 years. In 2005, their first season in the Essex Sunday League, they finished bottom with a batch of ingenus, average age 22; last year they won it; now they are in the Premier League. In all they run six teams, including three senior XIs. The gruesomely bad old days are gone. The clubhouse is no longer under constant threat of being torched; the racial epithets fly thinner and slower. With World Cup favours evenly distributed between India, West Indies, Sri Lanka, England and New Zealand, the Tebbit test is not so much ignored as stamped on. Home, though, remains virtually anywhere they lay their hats; and money is far too tight to mention.

Colts comprise 70% of the membership and, while a few of the current stable have been selected for county age-group sides, the Essex County Board's jarringly frank advice to aspiring players is to leave. The trouble is, many are uncoached and cannot afford the subs demanded elsewhere. Besides, loyalty, kinship and identity run deep. The priority, says Sachin, is plain: "We need coaching. Our aim is to get teams out on Saturday. Then maybe our players will get noticed."

Conscience dictates: I must come clean. When I discovered that the applicants for this year's Adopt a Club included one based in Ilford, my childhood sped past with a Proustian rush. Raised down the road in Wanstead, I had shed my East London roots on signing up for devout North Londonhood. Seldom have I ventured back over the past three decades except to cover Essex at Valentine's Park; only the neighbouring bagel bakery, an unassuming forebear of the ones now littering posher, trendier climes, tickled the nostalgia bone.

Along with Stamford Hill and Golders Green, Hendon and Edgware, Ilford and nearby Gants Hill were once bastions of London Jewry. My Ilford was a blend of Hassidic communities, second-generation synagogue stalwarts and Spurs-mad wide boys full of fast patter and faster fists, the East End Boys who courted Neil Tennant's West End Girls. Now I could not see the yarmulkes for the saris.

Typical of Ilford's inclusiveness is St Peter's Church in Newbury Park, wherein lie the remains of an American pilot shot down protecting Limey skies during World War Two: a Jew buried in a Christian graveyard. "It goes to show," claims Ilford's council website, "that multicultural Britain may have been started not by politicians or diplomats but by the good people of Ilford" - a lavish claim but not excessively wide of the mark. The contrast between Three Caps and Mullion's Cornish farmers and fishermen could barely be starker. Here is inner city and outer darkness.

The roots of this year's adoptees really lie at the end of the District Line in Dagenham, which numbers Sir Alf Ramsey, Terry Venables, Jimmy Greaves and John Terry among its footballing alumni, though Ramsey was so embarrassed by his dropped aitches he took elocution lessons. For 71 years, before the assembly line was shut down in 2002, it hosted the largest car manufacturing plant in Europe. Three Caps sprang from its immigrant loins.

Bhavesh Patel, the club manager, who arrived as a 22-year-old from Kenya in 1980, has been with Ford for 20 years. "These days I'm in the shipping area, sending parts to South America, but I worked in car production until it shut down. Ethnic minorities formed 60% of the assembly line workforce but now it's more like 40%. Sachin's dad, who coaches our colts, has done 30 years in the engine plant and we're friends. Sachin began to come along and muck around when the club started."

That was in 1993. "We were sitting in a mate's clothes shop in East Ham. Ramesh Patel, another Ford man who retired when the assembly line closed down and became our fixture secretary, suggested we start a team. He arranged a game against the West Indian team he played for, Bow Rovers - he was one of the few Asian fast bowlers. Somehow we managed to beat them. We appointed three chairmen, rag-traders from Catherine Road. They said they'd provide the cash for kit: we didn't have any money.

"We had two West Indian players, both from Ford," adds Bhavesh, adamant that the club, while Asian of image and lineage, is "open to all". In 1993 the sons of Indian and Caribbean immigrants were not in gangs, vying for turf, divided by their underclassness. Back then they were the outsiders and the ostracised, united by cricket.

Until recently "home" was council property. One near Dagenham ("the groundsman didn't even mow the pitch"), then a park in Hornchurch. Slings and arrows were endured with stubborn, stoical, stirring nobility. "We decorated the clubhouse," relates Bhavesh with well-tuned sang-froid, "but it burned down, twice, so we moved on."

Next stop Ford's own Sports and Social Club in Newbury Park, where the season's fee for pitch, dressing room, showers and clubhouse runs to £1,800, and a Saturday league side is well ensconced. Now they are planning to up sticks again, to Hainault, to a football and social club that was once devoted to cricket. The symbolism mounts.

The owner, happily, has promised to restore the summer game: Three Caps will finally have the home they crave. TWC will help with the bare necessities: there is a square to restore, nets, sightscreens and scoreboards to install, kit to distribute. The aim, by two years, is admission to a decent Saturday league. As that musical West Londoner Pete Townshend once put it, "Come on the amazing journey/And learn all you should know."