He will join a seam attack led by Jamie Porter and Sam Cook, who have taken a combined total of 899 first-class wickets, backed up primarily by Shane Snater and another winter signing, Mitchell Killeen.<\/p>\n
There will be no return to Chelmsford in 2026 for New Zealand all-rounder Doug Bracewell, though, after he recently announced his retirement.<\/p>\n
Akhter says he hopes to offer “a bit of pace, a game-changing spell and a some handy runs with the bat”.<\/p>\n
He came through the South Asian Cricket Academy, a non-profit organisation set up to address the lack of representation of British South Asians in professional cricket.<\/p>\n
Akhter did not make his first-class debut until he was 24, having experienced back problems as a younger bowler.<\/p>\n
“I had stress fractures when I was 18 in my lower back and then had another back problem in that season I was trialling with Essex,” he said. <\/p>\n
“When you’re not on the staff, you can’t really speak to physios or anything. So I was getting external help, which was amazing and got me back on the pitch.<\/p>\n
“I had to turn a few games down in the middle of the season to get myself right but those little setbacks when I was younger gave me a bit more time to understand my own game, figuring a few things out myself.<\/p>\n
“You see now guys making Test debuts past the age of 30, so if you don’t get signed at 18, it’s not the end of the world.”<\/p>\n
Essex start the 2026 season with an away Championship game against Hampshire on 3 April.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"He will join a seam attack led by Jamie Porter and Sam Cook, who have taken a combined…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":348196,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[1721,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-349485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cricket","tag-cricket","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349485"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349485\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/348196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}