India will go to the Asian Games in Japan later this month with a different man in the coach's chair. VVS Laxman, Director of Cricket at the BCCI's Centre of Excellence, has been named to take charge of the men's team in Aichi-Nagoya, with head coach Gautam Gambhir staying back in India for the senior side's home season opener.
This is a scheduling problem, not a demotion. India's men's cricket competition at the Asian Games runs from September 24 to October 1, with India's own campaign reported to begin on September 28, and the first ODI of the home white-ball series against West Indies is scheduled for September 27. The two assignments sit directly on top of each other. With India fielding what is effectively a second-string squad in Japan and the first-choice group at home, the BCCI has sent Gambhir where the senior internationals are and handed the Games to Laxman.
He is not an unfamiliar choice for the job. Laxman coached the Indian men's team at the 2023 Asian Games in Hangzhou, where India won the gold medal. Sending him back to defend that title with a similar brief — a young squad, a compressed knockout schedule, no senior head coach available — has an obvious internal logic to it.
Per the list of coaches released by the Sports Ministry, Laxman will be assisted in Japan by Sunil Joshi as bowling coach, Hrishikesh Kanitkar as batting coach and Subhadeep Ghosh in the support group, with Maroof Fajandar from BCCI Cricket Operations travelling as team leader. Joshi and Kanitkar have both worked extensively inside the BCCI's development pipeline, which fits a squad drawn largely from players still establishing themselves at senior level.
The men's squad for the Games is led by Shreyas Iyer with Tilak Varma as vice-captain, and was named alongside the T20I squad for the Afghanistan series. India's men are among four sides — with Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh — seeded directly into the quarter-finals on ranking, so Laxman's first assignment in Japan is a knockout match rather than a group-stage warm-up.
Analysis: the interesting part is not that Laxman got the job, but that the board chose to run two international-standard commitments in parallel rather than prioritise one. India could have sent a weaker group to the Asian Games and treated it as a development exercise, or rested players from the West Indies ODIs. Instead the BCCI has effectively duplicated its coaching structure for a fortnight — Gambhir's staff at home, Laxman's in Japan. That is only possible because the Centre of Excellence has been built out with coaches who can step into a senior role at short notice, and this month is the clearest test yet of whether that depth actually works under pressure.
Worth remembering that the women's tournament, where Harmanpreet Kaur's side opens against Japan in the quarter-finals, runs September 17-22 — before the men's event even starts. India's title defence in the women's competition will be settled while the men's squad is still travelling.
Fixtures and results from Aichi-Nagoya will be tracked on SportGod's live matches page, with AI predictions available once the knockout draws are locked in.
Coaching appointment, support-staff names and the fixture overlap are verified against same-day reporting on the Asian Games coaching list, current as of September 3, 2026.
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