Oxford Cricket Odyssey: How It Started

A cricketer from India called Navneet walks out to bat in Oxford. First match of his life on an English ground. He finishes forty-one not out.

Forty-one not out. That's a proper innings for a kid abroad for the first time.

His own words afterwards were that it "completely changed my confidence." And that's the thing the whole operation is built on. Not the runs. The change.

Okay, but who's running this? Because "cricket plus Oxford" sounds like something a very confident marketing person invented.

It was founded by Oxford alumni, which is the pitch and also the point. Their line is that Oxford shapes character and leadership, but for most people that experience simply stayed out of reach.

So they're selling access to a place, with cricket as the way in.

Cricket, academia, leadership and culture. Eleven days, residential, in Oxford. Students train, play real matches, and sit tutorials in between.

Tutorials? On a cricket tour?

Actual Oxford-style tutorials. And the faculty list is odd in a good way. There's a philosopher, Doctor Stephen Wright, whose session asks one question: how do you make a good decision when you don't have all the answers?

Which is... every ball you face, I suppose.

That's their whole argument. One moment on the field, read four ways. A philosopher asks whether it was a good decision. A performance scientist asks what the body did under pressure. A leadership person asks how the team reacted.

And a designer asks if there was a different way to do it entirely.

That's literally on their faculty page. There's also Doctor Aisha Ahmad on law and debating, and Doctor Richard Pye, who's an Oxford native, lectures at Oxford Brookes, and plays cricket himself.

So it's a residential school that happens to have nets. Does it actually land with the kids, or is that just the brochure?

One student, Yash, says he played seven matches in Oxford and discovered a passion for debating. Which I love, because nobody signs up for a cricket tour hoping to find debating.

His parents must have been thrilled. Paid for the bowling, got a barrister.

Now. The founding. Oxford Cricket Odyssey Limited was incorporated on the ninth of July, twenty twenty-four.

That's recent. Like, two-years-ago recent.

Two directors. Junaid Aziz, appointed September twenty twenty-four, an American national, forty-six, who works in design thinking and brand strategy. And Bharadwaj Ramanathan, appointed the month after, co-founder and chief operating officer.

Two people. That's not a company, that's a group chat with a logo.

Three employees, actually. Spread across India, Pakistan and the UK. Registered office in Poole, Dorset, of all places, though they describe themselves as headquartered in Oxford.

Hold on, before you go on. What do you reckon the first set of accounts looked like? Give me the number.

You go first.

Small but tidy. Maybe a few thousand in the bank, modest profit, boring.

Total assets, six and a half thousand pounds. Total liabilities, forty-nine thousand. Net assets, minus forty-two thousand seven hundred and forty-five pounds.

They're underwater. By more than they own, several times over.

The filing flags a significantly high debt ratio. Seven hundred and fifty-seven percent.

And they're out there selling an eleven-day Oxford residency to teenagers while the balance sheet looks like that.

Which is what building something from nothing actually looks like in the first year. Someone pays for the grounds, the coaches, the beds, the airport transfers, the twenty-four-seven support. Before a single parent in Delhi or Dubai has heard of you.

So the bet is: get the first cohort through, and let them tell everyone.

And they did. The alumni quotes on the site are all first names and countries. Navneet, Shresth, Yash, Aahan from India. James from the UAE, who says, "It was not just the cricket. It was the perspective that changed."

Is it working, though? What's the actual scale right now?

Honestly, tiny. Three staff. Sixteen followers on LinkedIn when that page was captured. They've published a post saying twenty twenty-six was a year of building the experience, and that in twenty twenty-seven they'll welcome the next cohort of scholar-athletes.

So the story isn't finished. We don't know if it makes it.

We don't. What we know is two alumni decided the Oxford experience shouldn't belong to a select few, and went forty-two thousand pounds into the red trying to prove it.

And expanded to schools, academies and... executive retreats, you said?

Corporate retreats, yes, built on what cricket shows you about decision-making under pressure. Which is the same product sold to adults with budgets.

Fund the kids with the chief executives. That's not the worst plan I've heard.

Junaid also writes. He published a piece in The Nightwatchman on Rohit Sharma's Test career, calling it art rather than arithmetic.

Art rather than arithmetic. Bit awkward, given the arithmetic.

The next accounts are due by April twenty twenty-seven. That's when we find out.

Right. Put a note in my calendar. I genuinely want to know how this one ends.