India’s Asia Cup squad went up and came down, and the ACC still has not announced the tournament

The Women’s Asia Cup is supposed to begin on 28 August. Teams have been told to land in the UAE on 27 August. Eight squads need flights, visas, hotels and training slots. And as of Tuesday, the Asian Cricket Council still has not formally announced that the tournament exists.

The clearest sign of how awkward that has become came on Sunday, when the BCCI published India’s 15-player squad with Harmanpreet Kaur as captain and Smriti Mandhana as her deputy, then quietly took the announcement down. Not because anything in it was wrong. Because a board cannot announce a squad for a tournament its governing body has not announced.

What the boards have actually been told

According to ESPNcricinfo, the ACC emailed the participating teams on 22 July with the tournament logo attached. In that email the venue was described as being finalised, teams were expected to arrive on 27 August, and the final was pencilled in for 13 September. Everything else, including the schedule, the grounds and formal confirmation of the dates, is still waiting on sign-off from the ACC’s leadership.

The UAE is the expected host, which surprises nobody given how much cricket Dubai, Sharjah and Abu Dhabi have absorbed in recent years. Expected is not the same as confirmed, and boards cannot book charter flights against an expectation.

Three weeks is not a lot of runway

Every participating country has been chasing the ACC for the schedule, and it is not hard to see why. Squads need visas for a country that has not been officially named. Support staff need contracts. Broadcasters need a fixture list before they can sell anything, and fans need one before they can plan to attend. For the smaller boards in this field, where a tournament trip is planned around limited budgets rather than around a permanent travelling operation, a three-week notice period is genuinely difficult.

The eight teams are defending champions Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Malaysia, Thailand and the hosts. Half of them do not have the administrative depth to absorb this kind of uncertainty, and none of them can pick a preparation plan without knowing when they play.

The Asian Games are right behind it

The calendar makes the delay worse. Women’s cricket at the Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya starts on 17 September, with the medal matches on 22 September, played as a straight knockout from the quarter-finals at Korogi Athletic Park. If the Asia Cup final really does land on 13 September, several of these squads go from a final in the Gulf to a quarter-final in Japan with four days in between, including the flight and the time change.

That is a scheduling problem worth planning around carefully. It is not a scheduling problem you can plan around at all while the first tournament has no confirmed dates.

There is a decent tournament underneath all this

Lost in the administrative fog is a competition India actually have something to prove in. They have won the Asia Cup seven times across its ODI and T20 editions, more than every other side combined, and they are still not the holders. Sri Lanka took the 2024 final in Dambulla, and India arrived at this year’s edition off a T20 World Cup group stage that ended without a semi-final. An India versus Pakistan group fixture, whenever it is scheduled, will draw the biggest audience of the tournament by a distance.

All of which makes the silence stranger. This is the sixth edition of the T20 Asia Cup, in a period when the women’s game is being sold hard on the back of professional contracts and franchise leagues. The players have done their part. Somebody at the ACC needs to send an email that is not just a logo.

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