Shaftab Khalid: Ex-Pears spinner joins Bears as coach from South Asian Cricket Academy

Shaftab Khalid made his Worcestershire debut in the first season of T20 cricket, in 2003

Former Worcestershire spinner Shaftab Khalid gave up county cricket when he failed to make a lasting breakthrough at New Road back in the early 2000s.

But 40-year-old Pakistan-born, London-educated Khalid has made a roundabout return to English county cricket by joining Warwickshire's coaching staff.

He becomes the latest recruit from the Birmingham-based South Asian Cricket Academy (SACA), which is growing fast.

The SACA was only formed in January 2022 but has already had a big effect.

Within a week of its formation by former Birmingham League cricketer Tom Brown and ex-England paceman Kabir Ali, as a means to offer Asian cricketers a better chance of getting into county cricket, two of its coaching team were offered jobs by first-class counties.

Kabir, cousin of Warwickshire and England all-rounder Moeen, became assistant coach with Yorkshire, while former Bears captain and head coach Jim Troughton was offered a job on Alec Stewart and Gareth Batty's staff with Surrey.

Khalid had previously worked as an academy coach with Worcestershire, for whom he made nine first-class and nine white-ball appearances from 2003 to 2005, and was lead performance coach for Minor Counties side Bedfordshire.

But, after spending the summer with the SACA as assistant/spin coach, he now becomes their first real coaching product out of a system which has already produced three players, Kashif Ali (Worcestershire), Andy Umeed (Somerset) and Zain-ul-Hassan (Glamorgan).

"I'm delighted Shaftab's become our first coaching graduate," said SACA co-founder and managing director Brown, who has just completed a PhD at Birmingham City University on this whole area of potentially lost cricketing talent development.

"He's been a major part of the SACA programme since the start and has already helped many players progress their game to the next level.

"I'm sure he can continue to do so with Warwickshire."

Khalid will predominantly work with teenage boys and girls as a high performance coach within the Warwickshire academy system, helping them to break into the senior sides as part of the Emerging Player Programme - but will also help coach senior teams.

"SACA has played against Warwickshire 2nd XI so I've seen what huge talent there is at the club," he said. "I'm relishing the opportunity to bring on some of those promising spinners and see them develop.

"Warwickshire have a youth system that's hard to beat in English cricket."

What is the South Asian Cricket Academy?

"It all came out of a conversation that I had with Kabir Ali during the Covid pandemic," Dr Brown told BBC Sport.

"We are a short-term intervention programme aiming to become obsolete within three to six years, acting as support for the generation of British South Asian cricketers that don't have time to wait for the system to adapt its practices to become more inclusive.

"We have a three-year grant to work off from Birmingham City University and some other sponsors, while Warwickshire, Essex and the England and Wales Cricket Board all very kindly helped fund my research.

"And we already have off-shoot projects round the country. We have a partnership with Cricket Scotland, another in Bradford, where our players have use of the Adil Rashid Indoor Centre, and Adil is one of our ambassadors. We are also in Bristol, where Gloucestershire allow us free sessions at the County Ground, and at Wellington College in Berkshire."