India’s practice was rained off, and their first ever match against Japan has no reserve day
Typhoon Dujuan has soaked Kanto ahead of Tuesday’s Suzuki Cup T20I at Sano, and the ground has already lost one match this week without a ball being bowled.
Sep 21, 2026
India have never played Japan at cricket. They are supposed to on Tuesday morning, at a ground in Tochigi Prefecture that a typhoon has spent the past two days soaking, and there is no reserve day if it does not happen.
The one-off T20I at Sano International Cricket Ground starts at 9:30am IST, 1pm local. It carries the clumsy official title of the Suzuki Cup, played under the Sport 75 banner that came out of a summit between Narendra Modi and Japanese prime minister Sanae Takaichi to mark 75 years of diplomatic relations. Strip the branding away and what is left is genuinely new: the first senior international between the two countries, and Japan’s first ever against an ICC Full Member.
Typhoon Dujuan got there first
Dujuan, the 25th typhoon of the year, moved towards Japan’s Pacific coast on Monday and dumped rain across Kanto, with forecasts of up to 300mm in the 24 hours running into Tuesday morning. India’s practice session on Monday was cancelled. The match-day forecast is better without being good: cloud, a high of 26 degrees, and a lingering chance of showers.
The worry is not really the forecast. It is what 300mm does to an outfield that has already given way once this week. Japan’s T20I against Hong Kong at the same ground was abandoned without a ball bowled. Sano is not built to soak up a typhoon, and a one-off fixture with no reserve day gives the groundstaff no second go at it. If enough overs survive, DLS handles the rest. If the covers stay on, the first India-Japan meeting just does not happen.
Who India have brought
Shreyas Iyer captains the squad India are taking to the Asian Games, with Tilak Varma as his deputy. Jasprit Bumrah is in it, alongside Abhishek Sharma, Sanju Samson, Ishan Kishan, Shivam Dube, Axar Patel, Washington Sundar, Ravi Bishnoi and Arshdeep Singh. Vipraj Nigam came in on 16 September when Varun Chakravarthy was ruled out with a side strain.
Then there is Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, who is 15 and the youngest athlete in India’s entire Asian Games contingent. He arrives off an IPL season that does not look real on paper: 776 runs, the Orange Cap, and 72 sixes in a tournament where the previous record was Chris Gayle’s 59 from 2012.
Iyer has not treated Tuesday as a formality, which is the right call given nobody in his dressing room has faced this attack or batted on this square. “It is going to be a thrilling and exciting match for us,” he said. “This is the first time we would be playing Japan, and do not know much about the conditions, the wicket, but looking forward to have a great match.”
Japan are not a novelty act
Japan sit 41st in the ICC men’s T20I rankings, which tells you the gap without telling you much else. Their captain, Kendel Kadowaki-Fleming, is the country’s all-time leading T20I run-scorer with 1,871 runs at a strike rate of 139.41 across 55 matches, including two hundreds and 12 fifties. That is a real record at any level of the international game, and it belongs to a player most Indian fans will hear of for the first time on Tuesday.
The squad list reads oddly to an outsider, full of hyphenated surnames, because Japanese cricket has grown mainly through dual-heritage players and returnees rather than a domestic base. The national side is more or less the development programme. Twenty overs against the reigning T20 World Cup champions is the best preparation available to them anywhere, and they need it: Japan open their Asian Games campaign against Afghanistan on 24 September.
They might meet again next week
India’s own route at the Games starts later. As one of the four highest-seeded sides they have a bye straight into the quarter-finals, and theirs is on 28 September at 2pm local against the runner-up from Group A. Japan are in Group A, with Afghanistan and Nepal.
So Tuesday is both India’s only competitive hit-out before a knockout match and, possibly, a dress rehearsal for it. That is a thin window even without rain, which is why India would much rather this went ahead. The men’s tournament runs to 3 October. India’s women, meanwhile, play their gold medal match against Sri Lanka on Tuesday morning as well. Two Indian sides, one day, and the men’s half of it hangs on a weather front.