About Twenty20 Community Cricket
ABOUT TWENTY20 COMMUNITY CRICKET
Affordable inclusive community cricket for all children in Surrey
The Oval, August 2024: Twenty20 Community Cricket’s Managing Director & Founder Darren Talbot is presented with the Outstanding Contribution to Coaching award at the prestigious Surrey Cricket Collective Awards.
This award recognises those who have gone to extraordinary lengths to expand reach and playing opportunities in diverse local communities.
Darren’s vision behind Twenty20 Community Cricket was to bring quality cricket coaching to state school educated children when such provision has all but been phased out.
The program is countywide across Surrey and year-round, including weekly academy training sessions, delivering focussed training throughout the off season, and indoor and outdoor matches across the year.
In the summer we schedule many hundreds of matches, covering all locations, age groups and both genders, so that children experience an abundance of matchplay opportunities to apply what they’ve learned, and to have fun and ‘fail until they succeed’. Every match is not only scored digitally and bolstered with an enormous array of supporting technical data, but live streamed and recorded online for posterity and subsequent review on YouTube.
For mid-teenagers who otherwise miss out on opportunities or formal pathways at club level, there are also two teams competing throughout the summer against adults: the 1st XI in the competitive environment of the Surrey Downs League, and the 2nd XI in adult friendlies on Sundays.
Community Cricket, Access and Equality
Twenty20 Community Cricket started in 2007 when Managing Director, Darren Talbot, left his City job to help support the development of state school cricket.
Shocked by the lack of appropriate school coaching whilst working for the Surrey Cricket Foundation in Guildford, Darren decided to change his career to focus on giving state school children more opportunities to play more and better cricket.
After spending the first ten years focussing on cricket within schools, Twenty20 expanded in 2017 with the establishment of ‘hubs’ across Surrey - the Twenty20 Community Cricket Academies. By 2025, there were over 270 boys & girls in the Academy training at 18 weekly hub sessions across Surrey and playing over 100 matches each year including in the adult Surrey Downs League (becoming Division 4 champions in 2023) and the Surrey Men's Indoor Cricket League.
This was developed further in 2020 when the MCC Foundation asked Darren to take over running their Guildford Hub for state school cricketers in the local community. Darren took the Guildford Girls' team to the National Final at Lord's four years running, winning in 2023, 2024 and 2025.
Individual player focus remains at the heart of everything that Twenty20 Community Cricket do.
The experienced Coaching Team meet regularly to discuss the players under our day-to-day stewardship with a view to supporting each and every one with their ongoing development. The team also provides members with written feedback each term.
Other Initiatives - inclusive cricket for young people
Darren is also a pioneer in women’s and girls' cricket; Twenty20 provides a range of off-season girls' only weekly coaching set-ups, in a number of locations across Surrey, culminating in regular girls-only fixtures throughout the summer.
He also manages the MCC Foundation Guildford Hub, whose girls' team won the national tournament at Lord’s, in 2023, 2024 and 2025 having been runners-up in 2022.
Darren has been heavily involved in supporting the development of other cricket around the world, having been Head Coach of Iceland and Head of Cricket and Chairman of Selectors for Sierra Leone. For 8 years he ran Deaf Cricket development across the UK and was CEO of the England Cricket Association for the Deaf Charity from inception.
Further, Darren arranges indoor league competitions that occur throughout the winter (across multiple venues, digitally scored and, where possible, live streamed). Darren was also the inventor of Walking Cricket - designed for those of an age or physical ability for whom the participatory window would otherwise have closed. He also arranges overseas camps and match play for players and their families, including the annual Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn cups in Vienna. He also produced and presented a fortnightly podcast targeted at helping club cricket to thrive, and was until 2025 a board member for the Surrey Junior Cricket Championship. He has been chairman of the Surrey Downs League since 2023.
As well as supporting player development through coaching courses in Surrey and South West London, Darren uses his experience to support the development of cricket clubs and ICC associate international cricket nations by offering development consultancy.
Darren says "encouraging young grassroots cricketers from all backgrounds and communities has been an amazing journey. I am proud of what we have all achieved in nearly 20 years of Twenty20 Community Cricket."
