Mumbai: Team India, the defending champions in cricket in Asian Games, are very keen to win another gold medal for the country, having announced a full-strength squad led by Shreyas Iyer with Jasprit Bumrah in fray.
However, there is a problem.
It has come to light that the infrastructure in Japan for a cricket competition featuring some of Asia’s biggest stars is far from ideal.
The T20 event in next month’s Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games is scheduled to be played at a venue in Nisshin, located east of Nagoya, which was a baseball ground until a few months ago. It has been converted into a cricket ground for the Asian Games.
The pitch, a hybrid surface with limited match history, has been installed only recently.
According to a BCCI source, the players’ dressing rooms have been set up in tents, while the washroom facilities are located 500 metres away.
Further, cricketers may have to share hotel rooms that are cramped with little breathing space.
The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) and Asian Cricket Council (ACC) are not happy about the arrangements for players in Aichi-Nagoya, ANI reported.
The BCCI is likely to send an observer to Japan to assess facilities at the cricket venue, and if found below par, a second-string team could be sent to the tournament instead of the originally picked squad.
“We told the Japan Olympics officials during the ACC in a meeting that the dressing rooms were set up in tents and washrooms were 500 metres away from those tents, which has created an unsatisfactory situation for the players. Also, the hotel rooms are really small, and it is a big concern,” a source was quoted as saying.
The 2026 Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games will be held from September 19 to October 4. The men’s T20 event will run from September 24 to October 3, while the women’s competition are scheduled from September 17 to 22.
Ten teams will vie for gold in men’s event, with the top four – India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh – being given automatic byes into the quarterfinals. The other six teams will play a preliminary round-robin league divided into two groups of three each, with the top two from each joining the four seeded teams in the knockout stage.
The women’s competition will bring together 8 teams which will play knockout quarterfinals straightaway.
INDIAN T20I SQUAD FOR ASIAN GAMES
Shreyas Iyer (captain), Sanju Samson (wicketkeeper), Abhishek Sharma, Ishan Kishan (wicketkeeper), Shivam Dube, Tilak Varma (vice-captain), Axar Patel, Washington Sundar, Nitish Kumar Reddy, Varun Chakravarthy, Ravi Bishnoi, Harshit Rana, Arshdeep Singh, Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, Jasprit Bumrah.
