Darren Talbot bio

Darren Talbot

Managing Director

A former Surrey U19 and Young Cricketer, Darren started working full time in cricket in 2007 following a successful City career.

After initially working in schools to develop their cricket, he created the Twenty20 Cricket Academy to provide hubs for state school cricketers to provide them with the opportunities they miss at school.

Darren was Inclusion lead for the Surrey Junior Cricket Championship until September 2025 - the largest cricket league in the UK - and is hub manager for the MCC Foundation in Guildford. The Guildford Girls won the MCC Finals at Lord's in 2023, 2024 and 2025, having been runners-up in 2022.

He is former High Performance Manager for the Sierra Leone national teams and ex-Iceland National Team Head Coach. He was also CEO of the England National Cricket for the Deaf (ECAD) Charity.

Through his talent ID skills, Darren increased the number of Deaf cricketers by over 500% as well as discovering many hundreds of mainstream cricketers in Surrey, particularly from the state school system.

He has been coaching since 2004 and his knowledge of grassroots cricket in the UK and cricket development in Europe is renowned.

In 2024 he won the Surrey Cricket Outstanding Contribution to Coaching award at the prestigious ECB Cricket Collective Awards ceremony.