Asian Games 2026 cricket schedule: full fixtures in IST, teams and India’s squads
India start in the quarter-finals of both tournaments, and the way the bracket runs they cannot meet Pakistan before 3 October. Every fixture, converted to IST.
Jul 18, 2023 · Updated Aug 30, 2026
Cricket at the Asian Games 2026 runs from 17 September to 3 October at Korogi Athletic Park in Nisshin, in Japan’s Aichi prefecture. Both tournaments are T20. The women play first, a straight knockout from 17 to 22 September, and the men follow from 24 September to 3 October. India are the defending champions in both, and in both they start in the quarter-finals.
Asian Games 2026 cricket schedule in IST
Every match at the ground starts at either 09:00 or 14:00 Japan time. Japan runs three and a half hours ahead of India, so those become 05:30 and 10:30 IST. Nothing here starts after lunch in India, and both gold medal matches begin at half past ten in the morning.
Women’s tournament, 17 to 22 September
Eight teams, knockout from the quarter-finals, no group stage at all.
| Date | IST | Match |
|---|---|---|
| 17 Sep | 05:30 | Bangladesh v China (QF1) |
| 17 Sep | 10:30 | Pakistan v Thailand (QF2) |
| 18 Sep | 05:30 | Malaysia v Sri Lanka (QF3) |
| 18 Sep | 10:30 | India v Japan (QF4) |
| 20 Sep | 05:30 | Semi-final 1 |
| 20 Sep | 10:30 | Semi-final 2 |
| 22 Sep | 05:30 | Bronze medal match |
| 22 Sep | 10:30 | Gold medal match |
India play the hosts. Win that and they meet whoever survives Bangladesh against China.
Men’s preliminary round, 24 to 26 September
Six teams, two groups of three, single round robin. The top two in each group go through.
| Date | IST | Match |
|---|---|---|
| 24 Sep | 05:30 | Japan v Afghanistan (A) |
| 24 Sep | 10:30 | Hong Kong v Malaysia (B) |
| 25 Sep | 05:30 | Hong Kong v Oman (B) |
| 25 Sep | 10:30 | Afghanistan v Nepal (A) |
| 26 Sep | 05:30 | Japan v Nepal (A) |
| 26 Sep | 10:30 | Malaysia v Oman (B) |
Men’s knockout stage, 28 September to 3 October
| Date | IST | Match |
|---|---|---|
| 28 Sep | 05:30 | Pakistan v Group B second (QF1) |
| 28 Sep | 10:30 | India v Group A second (QF2) |
| 29 Sep | 05:30 | Sri Lanka v Group B winner (QF3) |
| 29 Sep | 10:30 | Bangladesh v Group A winner (QF4) |
| 1 Oct | 05:30 | QF1 winner v QF4 winner (SF1) |
| 1 Oct | 10:30 | QF2 winner v QF3 winner (SF2) |
| 3 Oct | 05:30 | Bronze medal match |
| 3 Oct | 10:30 | Gold medal match |
India’s tournament is three matches across six days: a quarter-final on 28 September, a semi-final on 1 October, a medal match on 3 October.
India and Pakistan cannot meet before the final
This is the part almost every preview has got wrong, including ours. The two are usually described as being on opposite sides of the draw and able to meet from the semi-finals onwards. Follow the bracket through and that is not what it says.
Pakistan are in the first quarter-final and India in the second. The first semi-final pairs the winners of quarter-finals one and four; the second pairs the winners of quarter-finals two and three. So Pakistan’s route runs through semi-final one with Bangladesh’s side of the draw, and India’s runs through semi-final two with Sri Lanka’s. The two can only be in the same match on 3 October, and it is either the gold medal match or the bronze play-off.
The same bracket produces a second oddity. India face whoever finishes second in Group A, while Bangladesh face whoever wins it. Group A is Afghanistan, Japan and Nepal. If Afghanistan top the group, as their record says they should, it is Bangladesh who draw them in the quarter-finals and India who get the runner-up.
Which teams are playing
Ten men’s teams and eight women’s. Japan qualify as hosts in both. The Full Members take five of the men’s places and four of the women’s, and the rest came through regional qualifiers.
| Men (10) | Women (8) |
|---|---|
| India | India |
| Pakistan | Pakistan |
| Sri Lanka | Sri Lanka |
| Bangladesh | Bangladesh |
| Afghanistan | Japan |
| Nepal | China |
| Hong Kong | Malaysia |
| Oman | Thailand |
| Malaysia | |
| Japan |
Both fields are smaller than Hangzhou’s, where 14 men’s teams and nine women’s took part. A 300-capacity ground in Aichi cannot absorb what the Zhejiang University of Technology field did, and the entry list has been cut to match.
Why four teams skip the group stage
India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh were seeded straight into the men’s quarter-finals on the ICC men’s T20I team rankings as they stood on 23 July, the day the draw was made in Nagoya. That is the whole mechanism, and it hands the tournament its strangest feature.
Afghanistan have finished second in every Asian Games cricket tournament they have entered. Three entries, three silvers, in 2010, 2014 and 2023. They are also the side that has to play its way in, because their ranking on the cut-off date sat below Bangladesh’s. They have responded by picking six uncapped players and leaving Rashid Khan at home, which tells you how they are treating the trip. The draw itself has not moved since July.
India’s squads
The BCCI named the men’s 15 on 6 June and the women’s on 30 June, both far earlier than usual, because the Games window collides with a home series.
Men: Shreyas Iyer (c), Tilak Varma (vc), Abhishek Sharma, Sanju Samson (wk), Ishan Kishan (wk), Nitish Kumar Reddy, Shivam Dube, Axar Patel, Washington Sundar, Ravi Bishnoi, Varun Chakravarthy, Jasprit Bumrah, Arshdeep Singh, Harshit Rana, Vaibhav Sooryavanshi.
Suryakumar Yadav and Shubman Gill are not in it. Sooryavanshi is, at 15, on the back of an IPL season that brought him 776 runs in 16 matches at a strike rate of 237.30, plus the Orange Cap and the MVP award. He was 15 years and 65 days old when he took the Orange Cap, which makes him the youngest winner of it by some distance.
Women: Harmanpreet Kaur (c), Smriti Mandhana (vc), Shafali Verma, Deepti Sharma, Richa Ghosh (wk), G Kamalini (wk), Bharti Fulmali, Radha Yadav, Sree Charani, Renuka Singh Thakur, Kranti Gaud, Arundhati Reddy, Shreyanka Patil, Nandni Sharma, and Pratika Rawal in place of Jemimah Rodrigues.
Rodrigues tore her right hamstring playing in the Hundred on 3 August and lost the Women’s Asia Cup and the Games with it. Kamalini’s call-up came at Yastika Bhatia’s expense, and Shreyanka Patil was named subject to fitness after an ankle injury.
The title India won without finishing the final
India entered Asian Games cricket for the first time at Hangzhou, having skipped 2010 and 2014, and won both golds. The women beat Sri Lanka by 19 runs on 25 September 2023, defending 116 for 7 and bowling Sri Lanka out to 97 for 8, with Titas Sadhu taking 3 for 6.
The men’s gold was stranger. The final against Afghanistan was stopped by rain with Afghanistan 112 for 5 after 18.2 overs, and never restarted. India took the medal as the higher-seeded side. So the men arrive in Japan defending a title whose final was never played out, and the format gives nobody a second chance: both tournaments are knockout from the moment India enter them.
| Edition | Men’s gold | Women’s gold |
|---|---|---|
| Guangzhou 2010 | Bangladesh | Pakistan |
| Incheon 2014 | Sri Lanka | Pakistan |
| Hangzhou 2023 | India | India |
A ground with a pitcher’s mound outside the boundary
Korogi Athletic Park is owned by the Japan Cricket Association and sits about forty minutes by train from central Nagoya. Three baseball fields were converted into one cricket ground, finished in March 2026, and the pitcher’s mound is still there just beyond the rope. It is one of only two grounds in Japan with a natural-grass square that meets international standards.
Normal capacity is around 300. It held about a thousand for the East Asia-Pacific Qualifier earlier this year, and temporary stands will lift it to roughly 2,000 for the Games. Two Asian Games titles will be defended in front of a crowd that would not fill one stand at the Wankhede, and the rest of the Indian contingent has found the arrangements similarly improvised elsewhere in Aichi.
The scheduling problem India had to solve
West Indies tour India for three ODIs and five T20Is across the same fortnight. The ODIs are at Thiruvananthapuram on 27 September, Guwahati on 30 September and New Chandigarh on 3 October. That last one shares its date with the Asian Games gold medal match, and the two cannot be played by the same group of cricketers. Naming a full T20 squad for Japan in June and leaving the ODI series to the ODI players was the only way through.
The women have the tighter squeeze. Their Asia Cup in Dubai ends with the final on 13 September and their Games quarter-final is five days later in Japan. Thirteen of the fifteen names appear on both team sheets.
Where to watch in India
Sony Pictures Networks holds exclusive Indian rights to the 2026 Asian Games, so cricket will be on Sony Sports Network channels and streaming on SonyLIV across India and the subcontinent. With 05:30 and 10:30 IST starts, the second match of each day is the one most people will catch live.
Photo credit: Alamy
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