No Indian cricket team at 2023 Asian Games: Report

New Delhi: India will not be sending its cricket team to the Asian Games in Hangzhou, China later this year. Cricket will be the only sport where India will have no representation at the continental event scheduled to take place between 23 September and 8 October.

Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), the governing body for cricket in India, has cited prior commitments for not sending either men’s or women’s teams to the mega event.

“We have entries in all sports except one – cricket (team) isn’t going,” India’s chef de mission for the Asian Games, Bhupender Bajwa, told news outlet The Indian Express. “They said they are preoccupied. We sent 3-4 emails to them but when we had to send entries to the organisers, they said they won’t go.”

An anonymous BCCI official on its part said the board only received the email from India Olympic Association (IOA) just “one day before the deadline.”

According to the Future Tours Programme (FTP), India women are scheduled to play South Africa and New Zealand during that window. The men’s team, however, will be in action at the ODI World Cup on home soil in October-November.

India had the possibility of fielding two national teams – an option that was used in 1998 when one team competed in the Sahara Cup and another travelled for the Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur. More recently, in 2021, Shikhar Dhawan led a second-string Indian team to Sri Lanka while Virat Kohli captained the Test side in England.

Cricket has been included in two Asian Games in the past – 2010 and 2014 – and India skipped both. After being left out of Jakarta Games in 2018, the sport returns to the programme in Hangzhou.

BCCI’s decision to skip the Asian Games comes at a time when cricket is vying for a place at the Olympics. Incidentally, a decision in that regard could be taken this year at an International Olympic Committee (IOC) session in Mumbai.

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