The Women's Asia Cup Starts This Week, and India Meet Pakistan on 5 September
Eight teams, one venue, and a T20 tournament running to 13 September. Here is the shape of it, and the fixture that will draw the biggest audience of the lot.
The Women's Asia Cup begins on 28 August and runs to 13 September, with every match played at the Dubai International Cricket Stadium.
The format
Eight teams, split into two groups of four.
Group A: India, Pakistan, Thailand, Hong Kong China. Group B: Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, United Arab Emirates, Indonesia.
The top two from each group reach the semi-finals on 10 and 11 September, with the final on 13 September. The tournament opens with Thailand against Hong Kong China on 28 August. India play Thailand on 30 August.
The fixture everyone will watch
India meet Pakistan on 5 September. It is reliably the most-watched fixture in women's cricket, and it arrives in the group stage rather than being saved for a knockout, which means both sides will have played at least once before it.
India come in as seven-time champions. Sri Lanka are the defending champions, having taken the title at the last edition, and they are in the other group, so the earliest a rematch of that final could happen is the semi-finals.
Why a single venue matters more than usual
Every match at one ground, across seventeen days, in Dubai in late summer, is a specific set of conditions rather than a tour of them. That tends to compress the gap between sides: there is no home advantage for anyone, no travel, and no unfamiliar surface to be ambushed on.
It also means the pitch itself becomes a story. A square that hosts this many matches in this window will slow down, and sides batting second late in the tournament will be playing a different game from the ones who opened it. Whether that favours spin-heavy attacks, which most of these teams have, is the tactical question worth watching.
The gap in the field
Eight teams is a wider field than this tournament usually gets, and that is worth saying plainly: Thailand, Hong Kong China, Indonesia and the UAE are not competing on the same historical base as India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Pakistan. Some of the group matches will be lopsided.
That is not a criticism of the format. A tournament that only ever includes the same four sides is how a sport stays the size it already is. But a preview that pretends the field is even is not telling you anything useful.
What we can and cannot tell you
Our own records cover women's Twenty20 internationals from 2020, which is enough to say something meaningful about India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, and very little about the four sides who play the format least. Where we publish a number during this tournament, it will say which matches it covers.
We publish a batting forecast only once a fixture is confirmed and a squad is known, so anything we put out on these matches will follow the squads rather than the schedule.