India’s Asian Games began two days before the ceremony, on a curved table, with a football
Declan Gonsalves and Mohamed Anas Beg were the first Indians in action at Aichi-Nagoya 2026. Two group matches later, the World Championship bronze medallists were out of the men’s doubles.
Sep 17, 2026
India’s Asian Games began on Thursday, two days before the opening ceremony, in a sports hall in Nagoya, with two men kicking a football at each other across a curved table. Two matches later, it was over.
Declan Marshall Gonsalves and Mohamed Anas Imran Beg were the first Indian athletes in action at Aichi-Nagoya 2026. They lost their Group B opener to Vietnam 10-12, 8-12, then lost to a Korean pair in straight games, and that was the men’s doubles teqball tournament done for India.
Football, but on a table
If you have not come across teqball, the short version is that it is football played over a net on a curved table, and the ball is a real football rather than anything lighter. Hands and arms are out. Everything else is allowed: feet, thighs, knees, chest, head.
In doubles a pair gets three touches between them before the ball has to go back over, and they cannot use the same body part twice in a row, which is where the sport stops being a party trick and starts being difficult. Sets run to 12 points, with the decider needing a two-point margin.
The first set against Vietnam went to 12-10. They were two points away from taking it, and from there the match ran away.
The sport is barely a decade old. Three Hungarians built the first curved table in 2014, Ronaldinho gave it a global audience in 2016, the international federation FITEQ was set up in 2017, and this week it has an Asian Games medal event. Very few sports move that quickly.
The pair who made India competitive at it
Gonsalves and Beg are not making up the numbers in the way the scoreline suggests. In 2024 they became the first Indians to win a medal at a Teqball World Championships, taking bronze in the men’s doubles after losing their semi-final to Thailand, who went on to win the thing.
Those World Championships were held in Vietnam. Less than two years later, the first team to beat them at an Asian Games was Vietnam. Sport does that sometimes.
The gap between a World Championships bronze and a group-stage exit is worth sitting with for a second. Teqball’s competitive field is still small enough that a national programme with a handful of serious athletes can reach a podium, and still thin enough at the top that the same pair can go out in two matches. Both things are true at once, and neither is a scandal.
India are not finished in teqball
The men’s doubles is gone, but the teqball campaign is not. Quimcy D’Souza, the only Indian woman to qualify for the sport at these Games, has the women’s singles to come, and she partners Beg in the mixed doubles. India’s three-athlete teqball contingent still has two events left in it.
India came to Nagoya with a real outside chance in this event, and it went inside two matches on a day before the Games had officially opened. That is a bad day, not a bad campaign. D’Souza gets the next go at it.