Cricket's Dilemma at Asian Games: BCCI's Choice in Nagoya

In Nagoya, India’s cricketers may be living by a different rulebook.

If the BCCI decides its men’s and women’s teams will not stay in the official Asian Games hotels in Aichi-Nagoya, the Board will have to shoulder everything: rooms, food, local transport, and the daily race to get its players to the ground on time. The Indian Olympic Association will not be riding shotgun on that call.

IOA CEO Raghuram Iyer has made the lines of responsibility clear. The cricket board can seek its own comfort, but it must also carry its own burden.

IOA draws the boundary

Iyer, speaking to TOI, underlined that the IOA’s job is to look after an entire contingent spanning 36 sports, not to carve out bespoke bubbles for one discipline.

“BCCI CEO Hemang Amin got in touch with us, and we had a fruitful discussion. They are contemplating sending an advance team to Japan to assess the facilities. The IOA is completely fine with that,” Iyer said.

From there, the choice is squarely the BCCI’s. Use the organisers’ hotels or go off on their own. Either way, the IOA will not push for a separate arrangement on cricket’s behalf.

For now, the organisers have already slotted India’s teams into their matrix. The men have been allotted the three-star APA Hotel Nagoya Ekimae. The women, led by Harmanpreet Kaur, have been assigned the four-star Meitetsu Grand Hotel. Both are functional, both have the required amenities, but neither matches the five-star luxury India’s cricketers usually enjoy. Twin-sharing rooms add another layer of discomfort for players used to single-occupancy spaces.

Those details are not trivial in a sport obsessed with routine and comfort. They are potential flashpoints.

Tight turnarounds, tighter margins

The calendar only heightens the stakes. Harmanpreet’s side faces the first logistical squeeze. The women’s team returns from the Asia Cup in Dubai on September 13 and is slated to fly to Nagoya the very next day. Their Asian Games campaign starts straight in the quarterfinals on September 18 and runs through to September 22.

There is barely time to breathe, let alone adjust to a new country, new hotel, new commute.

Shreyas Iyer’s men have a slightly later entry. They leave for Japan on September 21, also straight into the quarterfinal stage. Their tournament runs from September 28, with the squad scheduled to return on October 4.

Different arrival windows, different rhythms, one common headache: how to give both squads a base that matches cricket’s expectations without disrupting the Games’ carefully balanced logistics.

Sensing that tension, the BCCI has already moved. An advance party will travel to Japan early next week to inspect the designated hotels, the cricket venue and surrounding facilities before the Board takes a final call, sources indicated. The inspection will decide whether India’s cricketers blend into the Games accommodation plan or step outside it.

A city under strain

Nagoya will not be rolling out empty corridors. The Aichi-Nagoya Games are already wrestling with a numbers problem. The athlete and coach count, initially planned around 15,000, is now expected to swell to roughly 17,000.

To cope, organisers are supplementing existing hotels with mobile accommodation and even the Costa Serena cruise ship. Space is at a premium. Any move by the BCCI to pull its teams into separate hotels would mean finding suitable properties in a city already stretched to capacity, then building a mini-Games ecosystem of its own around them.

If the Board decides the official hotels do not work and opts out, it will have to run the entire show: booking rooms, arranging food that meets players’ nutritional and cultural needs, organising local transport, and guaranteeing punctual arrivals at the cricket venue. There will be no excuses if a traffic snarl or a misjudged commute eats into warm-up time.

What such a move would not do is push India’s cricketers outside the Games’ formal framework.

Inside the Games, outside the village

Even if the BCCI picks its own hotels, the teams will remain part of the official system. The Board must communicate its decision through the IOA to the organisers, and all the usual Games protocols will still apply: security, accreditation, controlled access.

No accreditation, no entry. That rule will stand, whether the players sleep in an official hotel or a privately booked property.

Anti-doping operations would also need to adjust. WADA and the International Testing Agency must know exactly where the players are staying so that random tests can be conducted at their chosen base. Any off-site arrangement adds a layer of coordination, but the testing net will not loosen.

Iyer, for his part, is comfortable with the BCCI taking a hard look at what best serves its squads.

“The BCCI is taking care of its athletes, and sending an advance team is the right way to assess the facilities before making a decision. We are completely for the well-being of the athletes. Our objective is that the entire Indian delegation has a comfortable stay and a wonderful experience in Japan,” he said.

The message is clear: cricket can choose its own road, but the IOA will keep its gaze on the bigger convoy.

LA 2028: a different picture already forming

While Japan wrestles with hotel grades and room-sharing, another host city is quietly sketching a very different image of cricket’s place at a multi-sport showpiece.

Los Angeles 2028, where cricket returns to the Olympic programme, is already deep into planning. Iyer recently joined a joint IOA–Sports Authority of India delegation that spent nearly a week in Los Angeles, meeting stakeholders and walking through facilities across sports, cricket included.

“The objective is to ensure athletes can focus only on their performance and do not face logistical issues. We are thinking well in advance about their welfare, comfort and acclimatisation, and this is something which is happening for the first time,” he said.

The outlines are striking. Cricket’s LA28 venue, the newly built Knight Riders Cricket Ground at the Fairplex complex in Pomona, sits next to the Sheraton Fairplex Suites & Conference Center. That is where the cricket teams are expected to stay, a neatly contained high-performance hub with hotel and ground side by side.

Major League Cricket games are set to provide an early test of the venue and its playing surface, giving organisers a rare luxury: live, competitive feedback years before the Olympic cauldron is lit.

A dress rehearsal in Japan

Before any of that, Japan will stage its own small piece of cricketing history with India. The men’s teams meet in a T20I on September 22 for the Suzuki Cup, a match that doubles as a celebration of 75 years of diplomatic relations between the two countries and a timely tune-up for India before the Asian Games.

By then, the BCCI’s advance party will have reported back, the Board will likely have made its call, and India’s cricketers will know exactly where they will lay their heads in Nagoya.

Five-star comfort or functional compromise? For a sport used to travelling first class, the Asian Games may offer an early taste of what life looks like when cricket is just one of 36.