How Sachin Tendulkar changed Yorkshire cricket forever

A piece of Sachin Tendulkar will remain forever Yorkshire. He depicts his unlikely allegiance with the White Rose, consummated in the heady summer of 1992, as "one of the greatest four-and-a-half months I have spent in my life". And yet to savour the most exotic flavour of this chapter of Tendulkar the Tyke one needs to plot a course beyond Headingley, to the Texaco garage on Savile Road in Dewsbury, above which Solly Adam still cherishes the memories of when the young Sachin was neither the Little Master nor even a star, but simply the deferential teenage guest at his dining-room table.

"He would come for Indian food at my house, and my wife and sister-in-law would iron his clothes," says Adam, the garrulous businessman and self-made cricketing kingmaker whose extensive web of local-league contacts in old Bombay helped anoint Tendulkar as Yorkshire's first non-white player.

"Whenever he was free we would take him to weddings or the cinema. We would go up to Leeds for Kentucky Fried Chicken - for some reason he loved it." It was a time of such innocence that Adam, personally invited by Tendulkar to the farewell of kaleidoscopic madness in Mumbai this week, can barely believe it happened. "It clicks in my mind every time I see him now," the 61-year-old admits. "He is the god of cricket, mobbed whenever he steps outside his house, but here in the early Nineties he could be freer. We gave him a small Honda car with his name on and still he would not be bothered."

To sift through Adam's album of photographs of Tendulkar at 19 is to glimpse a world, a mere 21 years distant, already bathed in sepia. The famous photograph of him trussed up as a quintessential Yorkie, with a flat cap and foaming pint of Tetley's bitter, would be worth around half a billion rupees according to his image rights today. But by virtue of those few months as his host and protector, Adam has arguably the most privileged insight of any man in England into the boy behind the billboards.

"With us, he was quite a character, very bubbly," he reflects, negating more recent impressions of Tendulkar the wary diplomat, whose public pronouncements are so charming as to be bloodless. "He mixed with my kids, with my parents, and whatever he took part in he regarded very seriously. I remember that we took him to a snooker hall in Blackpool one weekend. He had never seen one of these tables before but within 30 minutes he was better than the rest of us. It was the same with tennis. An hour later, he would be striking the ball more cleanly than the chap teaching him how to play."

It is a dismally damp day here in West Yorkshire, where Adam runs a thriving cricket suppliers' business from his manic Dewsbury office, but still he exudes an effervescence befitting his role as the consummate fixer. He has close family ties with Sunil Gavaskar and, upon moving to England in 1963 and relishing a spot of minor counties cricket with Cumberland, he established himself as the crucial conduit for a generation of players from India and Pakistan - Imran Khan, Javed Miandad, Brijesh Patel - to follow his path to play club cricket in God's Own County.

Tendulkar, however, represented by far his most dramatic and implausible coup. For in 1992, Yorkshire County Cricket Club were not exactly the most lavishly hospitable recipients of imported talent. Indeed, Fred Trueman described the very decision to look overseas as a "b----- disgrace". It had been a cornerstone of policy for seven decades for their team to be resolutely homegrown, until a precipitate decline in form throughout the Eighties forced their hand, prompting Geoffrey Boycott's committee to vote by 18 to one to usher in an age of enlightenment.

As per the wishes of captain Martyn Moxon, Australian fast bowler Craig McDermott was their original choice as foreign player until, just one month before his scheduled debut on Good Friday, he pulled out of the deal citing a groin injury. Through much gnashing of teeth in the Yorkshire boardroom, the name 'Sachin' finally passed the lips of chairman Sir Lawrence Byford and Adam, who knew Tendulkar and could claim a mutual friend in Gavaskar, took his cue. "I hadn't brought guys like Imran or Javed over as an agent, but as a hobby," he explains.

"It was exactly the same with Sachin. I was the captain at Chickenley, here in Dewsbury, and he would ring me to say, 'Solly-bhai - literally, 'Solly, my brother' - I want to play in local league cricket for you. Why haven't you called me?' He was asking for pounds 100 a match. Ultimately, it didn't happen, but when Byford and Brian Close confirmed that they were interested in signing Tendulkar I said that it would be my pleasure. Sachin was with the Test team in Australia, but this time he sounded uncertain.

'No, I'm too busy,' he replied. Then, after a pause: 'But let me think about it.' So straight away I called up Gavaskar. He was the one who best understood Sachin's ambitions, and he was going to persuade him." Sure enough, Gavaskar imparted the right solicitous words and Sir Lawrence, with Yorkshire's touring party in South Africa, spoke to Tendulkar in an effort to cement the deal. By April 3 Chris Hassell, the club's chief executive, had arrived in India with a contract for their man to sign.

A more practical problem was the issue of where Tendulkar, suddenly transplanted from Bombay to the Broad Acres, would live. Adam, who took no commission from the arrangement and insisted he perceived the teenage Sachin "like a son", offered his own house but Tendulkar, in an early sign of the cultivated manners that would be his trademark, refused on the grounds that he might return too late from away games and disturb his elders. Thus it transpired - through the cluster of rented houses that Adam had already acquired for Vinod Kambli and Praveen Amre, two of Tendulkar's World Cup colleagues to have made the journey - that he made 34 Wakefield Crescent, a cream-coloured residence deep in Dewsbury suburbia, his first home on these shores. His maiden match for Yorkshire was, alas, a trauma. In the teeth of the bowling of Malcolm Marshall, against Hampshire at Headingley, he was out for 86.

Adam recalls: "He was so upset when we met afterwards. He had been run out at the non-striker's end and said: 'I'm very disappointed. I always like to score a century in my first match. Wherever I have made my debut before, I've always done so.'?" Tendulkar's score of 100 not out on his maiden first-class appearance for Bombay, aged 15, bears this out. But if his fleeting career at Yorkshire might be characterised as one of near-misses - given that he was caught short in the 80s three times and in the 90s twice, either side of a solitary century at Chester-le-Street - his time away from the wicket was exquisitely happy. "Sachin can be a quiet and lonely person, but there were a lot of cricketers from Mumbai here, and my house was like the family home for him," Adam says.

"Plus, his girlfriend Anjali, now his wife, would travel over from Gloucester to see him. While he tends to keep himself reserved, I found that he opened up once he thought he knew you. Once he makes friends, he doesn't forget." Adam discovered that Tendulkar could be strikingly generous with his time, "drinking" the game to such an extent that even after county practice, he would come to support him at his matches for Spen Victoria in the Bradford League.

"He respected me like a father and my wife like a mother. He had a great background, as the son of a writer and a teacher. I have always believed that while Brian Lara was a brilliant cricketer, he deteriorated because nobody was there to guide him. But Sachin always knew how to keep his feet on the floor." Upon leaving Yorkshire, Tendulkar confided to him that the exposure to the English county system "has made me eager to do better". And as India's greatest prepares to take his leave amid the splendour of a five-day carnival in his native city, Adam paints him unambiguously as the man who changed cricket. "Kids in India will ask, 'If Sachin can play at this level at 19, why can't I?' Players will come into the Test side younger than 21 purely because of him. He has transformed the entire tradition."

He is convinced, too, that he has chosen a propitious moment to retire: "I always like it when people say, 'He could have played for another two years', rather than, 'I'm glad he's gone'." But the most abiding picture for Adam arises not from this week's glorious valediction but from a gesture that his guest made upon leaving Dewsbury.

"I will take it with me for as long as I live," he says, visibly emotional. "He had his plane ticket back to India, and he knocked on my door at 11.30pm. He came in, and touched my feet. It is a traditional sign of respect in Hinduism. 'Solly-Bhai,' he said. 'I am going tomorrow.' And I gave him my blessing."