India’s Asian Games dressing rooms are tents, and the washrooms are 500 metres away

India are due to defend an Asian Games cricket gold in Japan next month, and the first thing the BCCI has said in public about the venue is that the dressing rooms are tents.

A board official, speaking to ANI on Friday, said the complaint had already been put to Japanese Olympic officials at an Asian Cricket Council meeting. The dressing rooms at the cricket ground in Nisshin have been pitched as tents. The washrooms sit roughly 500 metres from them. The hotel rooms allocated to the teams are, in the official’s phrasing, really small, and that was described as a big concern. The BCCI is sending an observer to look at all of it in person.

The line that travelled was about the squad

The facilities were not what made the story run. What made it run was the sentence that followed: if the observer’s report is bad enough, the board could send a second-string side instead of the one it named in June. That would mean an Asian Games without Jasprit Bumrah, without Shreyas Iyer, without Vaibhav Sooryavanshi. Every Indian outlet had a version of it by Friday evening.

It was walked back inside a day. Reports on Saturday said India will not send a B team, that the observer will still travel, and that whatever the observer finds will not change the squad. None of this has come with a name attached to it in either direction, which is worth saying plainly. What is on the record is one official’s complaint and an observer’s trip. The reasonable reading is that the first-choice fifteen is still going and the board wanted its irritation heard before anyone got on a plane.

Nisshin is a new ground in a small cricket country

Kōrogi Sports Park opened this year. It belongs to the Japan Cricket Association, it has multiple playing strips and practice nets, and it holds about 300 spectators. It staged T20 internationals in May and it sits on the qualifying pathway towards the 2028 T20 World Cup. Japan built a working cricket ground, not a stadium, and the Asian Games arrived at it.

That is the honest context for the tents. Eighteen teams and their support staff are turning up across three weeks at a venue with a square, nets and a few hundred seats. Nobody was hiding a pavilion. The question the BCCI is really asking is whether a gold medal match should be played somewhere that cannot house the teams contesting it, and that question does not have a comfortable answer three weeks out.

What India are actually going for

The women’s tournament goes first, eight teams from 17 to 22 September. The men follow, ten teams from 24 September to 3 October. Both are T20. India are seeded straight into the men’s quarter-finals on ICC ranking, so their tournament is three matches long at most: a quarter-final on 28 or 29 September, a semi-final on 1 October, the medal matches on 3 October.

They hold both titles from Hangzhou in 2023, and the men’s one arrived without a ball being bowled in the final. Rain washed out the gold medal match against Afghanistan and India took the medal on their higher T20 ranking. Three years on, the squad picked to keep it was announced on 6 June: Shreyas Iyer captains, Tilak Varma is his deputy, and the fifteen includes Bumrah, Arshdeep Singh, Axar Patel, Sanju Samson, Abhishek Sharma, Varun Chakravarthy and the 15-year-old Sooryavanshi.

That is a serious side to send anywhere. Whether it gets a dressing room with walls is still being negotiated.

Stay across India’s road to the Asian Games