The men's competition at the 2026 Asian Games gets underway in Nisshin, Japan, on September 24, two days after India's women wrapped up their own campaign with a gold medal. Shreyas Iyer's India squad, along with Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, has been seeded directly into the quarter-finals and won't play a single group-stage match before the knockouts begin.
Ten teams are competing in the T20 event at Kōrogi Sports Park, but only six of them play in the preliminary round-robin stage. Group A — Afghanistan, Japan and Nepal — and Group B — Hong Kong China, Malaysia and Oman — open the tournament on September 24, with Japan hosting Afghanistan and Hong Kong facing Malaysia, before the groups wrap up on September 26. Only the top two from each group advance.
As one of the four full-member sides seeded straight into the last eight, India will face the Group A runner-up in a quarter-final on September 28, the same day Pakistan meets the Group B runner-up. Sri Lanka play the Group A winner and Bangladesh face the Group B winner a day later, on September 29. Semi-finals are scheduled for October 1, with the bronze and gold medal matches on October 3 closing out the tournament.
India's squad — Iyer as captain with Tilak Varma as vice-captain — includes Jasprit Bumrah, cleared to play after a knee injury layoff following a match simulation at the BCCI's Centre of Excellence earlier this month, and Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, who at 15 is among the youngest athletes competing at these Games in any sport. The rest of the squad — Abhishek Sharma, Sanju Samson and Ishan Kishan behind the stumps, Shivam Dube, Axar Patel, Washington Sundar, Ravi Bishnoi, Arshdeep Singh, Yash Thakur and Vipraj Nigam — went through a round of late changes before departure: Nigam was added after Varun Chakravarthy was ruled out with a side strain, Thakur replaced Harshit Rana following a rectus femoris strain, and Nitish Kumar Reddy was withdrawn from the squad entirely.
Bypassing the group stage protects India from an upset against a lower-ranked side, but it also means the first real test of this squad's form comes cold, in a knockout, against an opponent that won't be confirmed until four days before the game. Afghanistan are the clear favourites to top Group A given their T20 pedigree, which would leave India facing either Japan or Nepal in the quarter-final — a fixture India should be expected to win comfortably on paper, though India needed the final ball to beat Japan by two runs in a rain-shortened T20I in Sano just last week, a reminder that margins can shrink fast in a shortened game. If both India and Pakistan navigate their respective brackets, the draw sets up a possible final between the two rivals, though both still have sides they haven't faced yet standing between them and that stage.
India's women closed out their own Asian Games campaign on September 22 with a 147-run win over Sri Lanka in the final to retain their title, while Pakistan beat Bangladesh for bronze. The men's squad will be looking to add to that medal count over the next ten days, in a tournament where — thanks to the direct quarter-final entry — every match India plays is effectively a knockout.
Fixtures, squad news and live scores from the Asian Games are tracked on SportGod's live matches page, with AI-powered previews on SportGod's predictions page and fantasy contests open in SportGod's free games.
Schedule, squad and draw details are verified against same-day reporting, current as of September 23, 2026.
Try Sport God AI live
Live scores, AI predictions, and fantasy — free during IPL 2026.