Next year, cricket will be played at the Asian Games in Japan. The Olympic Council of Asia (OCA) and the Aichi-Nagoya Games organizing committee (AINAGOC) will formally announce this during their meetings this week. The 20th Asian Games will take place from September 19 to October 4 in the following year.
“The OCA Board will still need to approve it. Although we think that is just a formality. But until they do it is not 100 percent,” a Japan Cricket Association (JCA) official told Cricbuzz on Wednesday (April 30) ahead of the meetings. An OCA statement said “the meeting will run from Wednesday, April 30 to Friday, May 2, with the 3rd OCA Coordination Committee Meeting taking place over two days on May 1-2.”
The Games will feature 41 sports, including cricket, and 15,000 athletes and officials from the 45 National Olympic Committees of the OCA will participate. After winning the yellow medals at the 2022 Asian Games, which took place in Hangzhou, China, from September 19 to October 7, 2023, the Indian men’s and women’s teams are the reigning gold medallists. As you may remember, the COVID-19 pandemic forced a postponement of the Games.
According to an OCA release, “The latest development in the compilation of the sports programme came at the 41st meeting of the AINAGOC Board of Directors at Nagoya City Hall on Monday, April 28, when cricket and Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) were both formally approved.” Cricket will be played in the T20 format, just like it was previously. The discussions this week will determine the precise number of participating teams. Nine women’s and fourteen men’s teams competed in the Hangzhou Games.
The main uncertainty surrounding the games is the location and if the organizers will choose to use a modular stadium, like the ICC did for the Twenty20 World Cup Games in New York last year. This will be decided at the meetings, according to the JCA spokesman.
“The venue for cricket will be in Aichi prefecture but the exact location has not been decided. Interest will be high, not only because of cricket’s popularity in South Asia in particular but also because the T20 (20 overs per side) format will be included in the Los Angeles Olympic Games in 2028. This will be cricket’s first appearance in the Olympics since 1900 in Paris, where Great Britain beat France by 158 runs in the final of the two-team tournament,” the OCA statement says.
