The Oval Cricket Relief Trust has been celebrating its 20th anniversary this year – but what is the story of this charity and how has it helped cricket around the world?
The Trust was initially setup by former Surrey CCC Chief Executive Paul Sheldon as part of his desire for the Club to step up and help our friends in Sri Lanka after the west coast of the island suffered catastrophic damage in the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004.
Funds to carry out this work were raised from an all-star T20 match, held at The Oval in June 2005, pitting an Asia XI against an International XI.
The Asia XI featured players of the calibre of Sanath Jayasuriya, Virender Sehwag, Rahul Dravid, Maleha Jayawardene, Anil Kumble, Muttiah Muralitharan, Harbhajan Singh and Kumar Sangakarra (who would return to The Oval ten years later for a memorable stint with Surrey).
They took on an equally star-studded International XI featuring Shane Warne, Brian Lara, Shaun Pollock, Andy Flower, former Surrey skipper Adam Hollioake and Australian Greg Blewett, who starred with 91* from 61 balls as the International XI triumphed by six wickets.
More importantly, the game raised over £1m – partly thanks to then Club and ground sponsors Brit Insurance. This was used to rebuild Maggona, a small fishing village on the southwest coast of Sri Lanka. The work was carried out immediately and the rebuilt village, now featuring roads named after Surrey greats such as Alec Stewart and Graham Thorpe, was opened in a ceremony held on February 7th, 2007.
As well as the housing and businesses that were rebuilt, Maggona features a first-class cricket ground, which has been used by the Surrey Academy on tours to Sri Lanka.
The Oval Cricket Relief Trust has remained in touch with the work in Maggona, recently giving another grant of £10,000 for maintenance and improvement work at the cricket ground, which still carries Surrey CCC branding.
If any Surrey fans are ever in Sri Lanka, Maggona lies on the south-west coast of the island between Colombo and Galle and is well worth a visit. It is approximately two hours south of Colombo and the same distance north of Galle, offering an excellent stopping off point on a trip between the two cricketing destinations.
Since then, the Oval Cricket Relief Trust has remained active, giving grants to programmes in the Caribbean, India and Australia before forming two of the Club’s most significant ongoing partnerships.
Rwanda
In 2016, the OCRT partnered with the charity Cricket Builds Hope to support the development of a new cricket stadium in Kigali, Rwanda.
The ground was completed a year later and was ceremonially opened with another all-star match, this time with an international team clad in Surrey T20 shirts featuring England’s Sam Billings and Michael Vaughan alongside South African great Herschelle Gibbs and Kenyan legend Steve Tikolo taking on the Rwanda Men’s team.
The ground has been busy ever since and now holds the official ICC world record for staging the highest number of international T20 matches of any ground in the world. As well as this, it is used for Rwandan domestic cricket and a series of Cricket Builds Hope programmes using cricket as a tool for positive social change in Rwanda.
The Club continues to help support the growth of cricket in Rwanda, a country that had never played the sport until the mid 2000s. Despite this, the Rwandan U19s qualified for the inaugural U19 Women’s World Cup in 2023, reaching the Super Sixes and defeating both Zimbabwe and the West Indies in the process.
Surrey have also sent staff to Rwanda on two occasions, including members of the Kia Oval grounds team, to help maintain and develop the stadium.
Rwandan cricket continues to grow. The Rwandan Women’s team are currently ranked 24th in the world and have ambitions to reach future World Cups and also play in the recently minted ICC Emerging Nations Trophy, the first ever addition of which was held last month in Bangkok.
Brazil
The Oval Cricket Relief Trust has also formed a partnership with Cricket Brasil, another trailblazer for global cricketing development.
Formed in 2024, OCRT are supporting the development of cricket in Brazil with a three-year grants programme that is designed to help enhance and develop the quality of the cricketing infrastructure in the town of Pocos de Caldas, where Cricket Brasil is based.
OCRT money first enabled Cricket Brasil to increase the size of their High Performance Centre by 600 square feet, adding a new fielding area and permanent changing rooms. It will also enable the creation of the first grass nets in Brazil and the installation of the first indoor net system in the country, both of which are due to for completion in 2026.
The cricket scene in Brazil is now seeing some of the fastest development in the world, with 11,000 Brazilians playing the game regularly. Now augmented by funding from the Brazilian Olympic Commission, the national women’s team is ranked 35th in the world and recently defeated both Jersey and the Isle of Man in a triangular tournament staged at a club in Yorkshire.
2026 will see Brazil tour Botswana as guests in an African tournament and then visit the ground in Kigali that is supported by OCRT, to take part in the Kwibuka Tournament, a major international annual event in Rwanda that recognises and remembers in the genocide that took place there in 1994.
