The Asian Games cricket ground has no floodlights, and India’s quarter-final moved half an hour earlier

Three men’s knockout matches at the Asian Games cricket tournament have been pulled forward by half an hour, and the reason is about as basic as sport gets. Korogi Sports Park, the ground in Nisshin that stages every match of both tournaments, has no floodlights.

India’s quarter-final on September 28 is one of the three. It was listed for 2pm Japan time, 10.30am IST. It now starts at 1.30pm local, which is 10am back home. The second semi-final on October 1 and the gold-medal match on October 3 have shifted by the same 30 minutes.

Daylight made the decision

Light goes early in central Japan by late September, and a men’s T20 takes longer to get through than the women’s equivalent. Put a knockout on at 2pm with no lights available and the last overs are being played in gloom, which is how a gold-medal match ends up decided by something nobody wants to talk about afterwards.

The matches that were never at risk have not moved. The first quarter-final, the first semi-final and the bronze-medal play-off all begin at 9am local time, 5.30am IST. Preliminary games keep their 9am and 2pm slots. The women’s tournament has not been touched at all.

A cricket ground that did not exist a year ago

Korogi sits about 20 kilometres east of Nagoya and was finished in March 2026, built on a site that used to hold three baseball grounds. The square has four turf pitches and one hybrid surface, natural clay stitched through with synthetic fibre, the same approach used in Australia and Sri Lanka. The shortest boundary measures 65 metres, roughly ten more than teams had at Hangzhou.

What it does not have is a set of lights, and that single gap now decides when the biggest matches of the tournament are played.

India walk straight into the quarter-finals

The men’s event runs from September 24 to October 3 with ten teams. The four highest ranked in T20Is, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, are seeded directly into the quarter-finals. The other six play a preliminary round from September 24 to 26, split into two groups of three: Afghanistan, Japan and Nepal in one, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Oman in the other. Two go through from each group.

India’s quarter-final opponent will be whoever finishes second in the Afghanistan group, so a meeting with Afghanistan or Nepal is the likely outcome. Shreyas Iyer captains the side with Tilak Varma as his deputy, VVS Laxman is in charge as head coach, and the squad carries both Jasprit Bumrah and 15-year-old Vaibhav Sooryavanshi.

The women are on first

India’s women get going a week earlier. Their tournament runs from September 17 to 22, all eight teams start at the quarter-final stage, and Harmanpreet Kaur’s side face hosts Japan on September 18 at 2pm local time, 10.30am IST. The semi-finals are on September 20 and the final on September 22. They travel to Japan straight from the Women’s Asia Cup in Dubai.

Two golds on the line

India are defending both titles from Hangzhou in 2023, and the two were won very differently. The women beat Sri Lanka by 19 runs in the final, defending 116 for 7 and bowling their opponents out to 97 for 8. The men never finished theirs at all. Rain ended the final against Afghanistan and India took gold on the strength of their T20I ranking.

The IOA says nobody told it

The revised timings are already published on the official Asian Games website. Indian Olympic Association officials say they have not been formally notified of any of it, which is a small thing until a travelling squad plans a warm-up around a start time that has quietly moved.

Stay across India’s Asian Games campaign