Mumbai: It was the late ‘80s and English cricket was in disarray. So a man called William Greaves started a charity organisation in London called Capital Kids Cricket and during his initial years of working with primary schools in London’s not-so-privileged quarters, met a kid of Indian origin

His name was Ravinder Bopara. And he wanted to be “England’s Tendulkar”.

The ambition did not touch Greaves as it wasn’t unusual for kids in little Bopara’s generation to wish to be like Tendulkar. But his enthusiasm did. And that seems to have proved enough to put him in the big league of English cricket.

More than a decade later, Bopara has become the first product of Greaves’s revival initiative to make it to the England squad — he has been named to replace Kevin Pietersen in the ongoing Commonwealth Bank tri-series in Australia. Pietersen is returning home with a broken rib.

Greaves today told The Sunday Express that he never expected the Indian kid would become Capital Kids’ mascot and be one of the most promising cricketer in England.

“He wanted to be England’s Tendulkar but now he has a task that is equally difficult — to replace Kevin Pietersen and tour Australia,” said Greaves. Despite England’s dismal show in the Ashes and the first one-dayer, Greaves doesn’t think it’s a trip to the slaughter house for his star student, who has been playing for Essex since 2002.

Bopara — known as Puppy in the dressing room — was born in 1985 in London in a Sikh family. His father Charanjit Singh Bopara was born in Punjab but moved to London as a boy.

The young cricketer had a role play when England floored the Aussies during last year’s Ashes tour. A 134 for Essex in a side game against a fierce Aussie attack meant Bopara, who has had a long stint with the England A and under-19 national squad, was ready for the big stage.

And that’s something many at the World Cricket Academy (WCA) at the Cricket Club of India in Mumbai, where Bopara has had two stints, vouch for. WCA director Sachin Bajaj recalls the friendly guy who was a livewire on the field. “It was a real pleasure to know him. The late Hanumant Singh was his mentor and he spoke very highly of him,” he says.

“A top-order batsmen, a brilliant fielder and an occasional bowler, too. He isn’t a slam-bang player but someone who can play in the gaps,” says Bajaj. It is a description that his coach at Essex, Graham Gooch, agrees with. The former England opener has called him a player who “fits the bill of the modern cricketer — talented with the bat, brilliant in the field and a useful medium pacer in one-day cricket”.

Guru Greaves ranks Puppy’s professionalism high. “He told me once that his father had a tough time waking him for school. But on cricket days, it was Bopara who used to wake his father.”
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