This year we hope to achieve our £40,000 fundraising goal for the Oxford Children’s Hospital, and with our football match at the weekend, we are edging closer to our very special target, as well as topping up our funds for our friends at Headway.
Saturday evening (March 19th) saw our second charity football match take to the pitch at Oxford City Football Club for an exciting, thrilling clash of the footballing titans which saw a team of P2G Stars take on a team of Headway Heroes in the nail-biting 90-minute game at the home of Court Place Farm – one of Play2Give’s longest serving and loyal supporters of many years.
The match was raising money for the Children’s Hospital as well as Headway Oxfordshire – the wonderful brain injury support charity based in Kennington – which supports over 400 brain injured survivors and their carers.
Speaking to the Oxford Mail pitch-side, Claire Twinn, Headway Oxfordshire’s service manager, said: “It’s been brilliant to see so many people come out to support us, I am always impressed that they are willing to give their time up.
She added: “We are increasingly relying on fundraising now that we get less money from local authorities, so events like this are really wonderful.”
In September, 2014, we first held our annual match for the charities when P2G Stars won 20-1 against a team of staff from Sainsbury’s Didcot. However, this year’s champions emerged 4-3 seeing Headway charity team lift the cup to victory by the end of the game, a tense match all round.
This event is just the start to our fundraising year in which after our most successful record year in 2015 that saw Play2Give donate over £13,530 to our selected charities, we hope we will raise many more thousands of pounds, and, hopefully achieve our very special £40,000 goal to name Play2Give’s own room on the teenage ward at the Oxford Children’s Hospital. We are now just £3,500 away from our goal.
We plan to hold another football match in 2017 when we hope to reclaim back as a team the P2G Cup against next year’s opponents.
We would like to say a huge thank you to Oxford City Football Club for generously hosting and donating the pitch, to all the supporters and players, and also to Matthew Crook and Stuart Crook, brothers from Oxford, who helped to organise the P2G Stars team.
