The draw for cricket at the 2026 Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya, Japan, is out, and India's defending champion women's team already knows its opening opponent: Japan, in the quarter-finals. The BCCI has also confirmed the full 15-player squad Harmanpreet Kaur will lead into the tournament.
Both the men's and women's competitions are T20 events carrying full international status, played entirely at Korogi Athletic Park in Aichi Prefecture. The women's tournament runs September 17-22, ahead of the men's event from September 24 to October 1 — meaning the women's squad's campaign begins first, and its business end will already be known before the men's group even gets going.
With eight teams in the women's field, the tournament goes straight to knockouts: India face Japan, while the other quarter-finals pit Bangladesh against China, Sri Lanka against Malaysia, and Pakistan against Thailand. On paper, Japan are the weakest side India could have drawn in that bracket — but a straight knockout format leaves no margin for a slow start, whatever the seeding suggests.
India's 15 for the Games: Harmanpreet Kaur (captain), Smriti Mandhana (vice-captain), Shafali Verma, Jemimah Rodrigues, Deepti Sharma, Richa Ghosh (wk), G Kamalini (wk), Bharti Fulmali, Sree Charani, Renuka Thakur, Kranti Gaud, Arundhati Reddy, Shreyanka Patil, Radha Yadav and Nandni Sharma. Shreyanka Patil's name carries a fitness caveat and is subject to clearance closer to the tournament.
Jemimah Rodrigues' name appears in that squad list, but as covered around the Women's Asia Cup, she is still working through a high-grade hamstring tear suffered in The Hundred in early August and has already been ruled out of the Asia Cup. Reports around this squad announcement confirm she has been ruled out of the Asian Games too, with Pratika Rawal — who made an immediate impression on her T20I debut against Thailand in Dubai — the player selectors are leaning on as her replacement for the actual tournament, even where the initial squad list still carried Rodrigues' name pending the injury update.
India travel to Japan as the reigning champions, having won the gold medal in women's cricket's Asian Games debut at the 2022 Games in Hangzhou (held in 2023 after a pandemic-related delay). That history adds real weight to a squad that already carries several players — Harmanpreet, Mandhana, Deepti Sharma, Richa Ghosh — who were part of that winning campaign, alongside newer names like Sree Charani and Kranti Gaud looking to make their own mark on the title defence.
On the men's side, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh have all been seeded directly into the quarter-finals based on ranking, skipping the opening round entirely. The remaining six teams open in two groups — Afghanistan, Japan and Nepal in Group A, and Hong Kong, Malaysia and Oman in Group B — with the top two from each advancing to join the four seeded sides in the last eight. India's men's squad, led by Shreyas Iyer with Tilak Varma as vice-captain, was named alongside the T20I squad for the Afghanistan series and includes Vaibhav Sooryavanshi.
With the women's quarter-final against Japan now the first fixture on India's Asian Games calendar, track squad news and build-up on SportGod's live matches page, and check AI predictions once the tournament gets underway on September 17.
Draw details, squad names and the Rodrigues injury update are verified against same-day reporting on the Asian Games cricket announcements, current as of September 3, 2026.
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