Afghanistan hand the Asian Games to six uncapped players, with Rashid Khan staying home
Darwish Rasooli will lead a 15-man Afghanistan squad in Japan next month in which six players have never been capped. India, meanwhile, are sending Bumrah, Iyer and Sooryavanshi to defend their gold.
Aug 17, 2026
The Afghanistan Cricket Board picked its Asian Games squad on Monday, and the interesting part is the list of names missing from it. Darwish Rasooli will lead a 15-man group to Japan next month. Six of the players he takes with him have never played international cricket, and Rashid Khan, Rahmanullah Gurbaz and Mohammad Nabi are all staying at home.
A squad with 33 caps at the top of it
Rasooli has 33 international appearances, which is enough to make him one of the more experienced men in his own dressing room. Najibullah Zadran, with 199, and Karim Janat, with 80, carry most of the rest. Nangyal Kharoti is the only other player in the group to have been picked more than ten times for Afghanistan. Five more sit under ten caps, and then there are the six who have none at all.
The full 15: Rasooli, wicketkeeper Mohammad Ishaq, Mohammad Akram, Hassan Eisakhil, Khalid Taniwal, Imran Mir, Faisal Shinozada, Najibullah Zadran, Farmanullah, Ismat Alam, Karim Janat, Nangyal Kharoti, Arab Gul Momand, Faridoon Dawoodzai and Abdullah Ahmadzai. Several of them come straight out of the Shpageeza Cricket League, Afghanistan’s domestic T20 competition. Ismat Alam was the player of that tournament with 294 runs at a strike rate of 168, and Akram finished as its second-highest scorer.
The calendar explains most of it
Afghanistan’s first-choice side is busy. They host India for three T20Is at the Arun Jaitley Stadium in Delhi on 13, 15 and 17 September, a home series played on Indian soil because Afghanistan still cannot stage matches at home. The Asian Games cricket tournament in Aichi-Nagoya begins on 24 September and runs to 3 October. That leaves a week between the end of a series against one of the best T20 sides in the world and the start of a ten-team event two flights away.
What makes the choice sharper than a straight scheduling call is that the Asian Games matches are not exhibitions. The ICC granted the men’s and women’s tournaments full T20 international status from Hangzhou onwards, so every ball Rasooli’s group faces in Japan counts on the record and in the rankings. Afghanistan are sending six debutants into official international cricket, not into a warm-up.
India made the opposite choice
The BCCI looked at the same clash and sent close to a full-strength T20 squad. Shreyas Iyer captains, Tilak Varma is his deputy, and Jasprit Bumrah, Abhishek Sharma, Sanju Samson, Axar Patel, Varun Chakravarthy and Arshdeep Singh are all in it. So is Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, who is 15 and won the Orange Cap in IPL 2026 with 776 runs for Rajasthan Royals.
India are also the holders, from a final that never finished. Afghanistan made 112 for 5 in 18.2 overs in the Hangzhou final on 7 October 2023, rain washed out the rest of it, and the gold went to India as the higher-seeded team without a ball being bowled in reply. Afghanistan took silver from a final nobody finished. Three years on, one of those two sides is sending its best players back and the other is not.
The draw could still put them together
Afghanistan are in Group A with hosts Japan and Nepal, with the top two from each preliminary group joining the four seeded teams in the quarter-finals. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka all go straight through on their T20I rankings. Get out of the group, which Afghanistan should, and Rasooli’s largely uncapped side runs into a seeded team immediately.
That is the part worth sitting with. A tournament this thin on senior players is a hard place to learn, but Afghanistan’s problem for years has been that there is no obvious place to learn at all. Rashid, Nabi, Gurbaz and Ibrahim Zadran have carried almost every meaningful match the country has played since 2021, and the search for who follows them has mostly happened in nets and A-tours. Ismat Alam and Arab Gul Momand are names Afghan supporters know from domestic cricket and nowhere else. By 3 October some of them will have played a T20 international that mattered, against opposition that was trying.
Rasooli has something to gain too. He debuted in March 2022 and has never held down a place, and he has led the side once before, against Qatar, where he made 66. Captaincy at a multi-sport event is not a promotion so much as an audition with the volume turned down. Do it well and Afghanistan have one more answer in a middle order that has been short of them.