SACA opens fifth regional hub in Leyton, East London

Not the Mystic East, but new neighbours for The Orient, The South Asian Cricket Academy (SACA)  has now  opened its fifth high-performance regional hub, with Leyton in East London becoming the latest focal point in the country to benefit from the opportunities that SACA provides.

The Leyton hub, based at Essex Cricket’s Leyton Urban Cricket Hub, joins the existing four other established SACA regional hubs across the country, in the Midlands in Birmingham and Derby, the North in Bradford, the Southwest in Bristol and the Southeast in Wokingham.

A growing and impressive track record for SACA

From those four existing hubs, to date SACA has successfully secured contracts with Professional County Clubs for no fewer than 18 British born South Asian cricketers within its Academy programme, 8 of which were secured last year alone, with high hopes of more SACA graduations to follow in 2026. Only recently SACA announced exciting plans to launch their inaugural Women’s programme, with support from Take Her Lead, the registered charity dedicated to equality & inclusion for women and girls in cricket and the launch of SACA’s Women’s programme is another significant step in what has been an incredibly successful journey for the Academy to date. SACA’s track-record sees the Academy, which was founded in 2022, stand head and shoulders above other elite programmes in the country in its record of success, and the opening of the Leyton hub is seen as another perfect opportunity to provide an elite high-performance environment to help develop local talent and create opportunities for its players to cement futures in the professional game. Essex Cricket deliver strong support for SACA Tom Brown, Founder and Managing Director of SACA, commented “Leyton, and large parts of East London and bordering Essex are rich in their cultural diversity and the passion for cricket in the area is enormous. We know the talent is there and we can’t wait to create yet more opportunities for cricketers who come into our programme to further their ambitions in the game”  He was also quick to praise the support received from Essex CCC saying “Our thanks go to Essex Cricket, who have played a big hand in helping us to set up the Leyton hub and have been immensely supportive of all that SACA has done to date. We are looking forward to continuing to work closely with them as the programme moves ahead.”

SACA recently announced its fixture list for the 2026 season, confirming the Academy will take on 16 of the Professional County Clubs across the three formats of the game this year, which will again provide an array of opportunities for SACA’s players to showcase their skills against their professional peers.