Cricket at the Asian Games Starts This Week, and India Defend Two Gold Medals

Cricket returns to the Asian Games this week in Aichi, Japan, with every match at Korogi Athletic Park and the whole competition played in the T20 format.

The schedule

The women's tournament runs from 17 to 22 September, with eight teams and a straight knockout from the quarter finals. The men's tournament runs from 24 September to 3 October, with ten teams, and finishes with the bronze and gold medal matches on the final day.

Match days are double headers, with the morning game starting at 9am local time and the afternoon game at 2pm.

India defend both titles

India won both the men's and women's gold medals at Hangzhou in 2023 and enter both tournaments as defending champions. For the men, this is the series immediately after their T20Is against Afghanistan, and the squad for it was named at the same time.

Why a knockout changes the cricket

A group stage forgives a bad day. A quarter final does not. The women's tournament in particular, going straight to knockouts from eight teams, means a side can be eliminated by one rain affected afternoon or one collapse, and the teams most likely to suffer are the ones whose strength is consistency rather than a high ceiling.

That tends to favour sides with a match winner who can settle a game on their own, and it is part of why Asian Games cricket has produced results that a longer tournament would not have.

The other reason this matters

Cricket's presence at multi sport events is no longer a curiosity. The sport is on the programme for the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028, and every Asian Games and Commonwealth Games tournament in between is, in effect, a rehearsal for how cricket fits into an event it does not organise: short windows, shared venues, and squads picked around a calendar that was built without it.

The opening women's matches on 17 September are Bangladesh against China, followed by Pakistan against Thailand.