Asian Games 2026 will get underway in Nagoya; Indian girls’s cricket staff begins title defence in opposition to Japan

By Vipul Kashyap

Nagoya [Japan], September 18 (ANI): India may have a busy day on the Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games 2026 on Friday, with motion throughout cricket, smooth tennis and teqball. 

The day begins with the Indian males’s smooth tennis staff taking up Laos in Group C, adopted by matches in opposition to Chinese Taipei and Mongolia. In teqball, Indian athletes may even be in motion in girls’s singles and combined doubles occasions via the morning and afternoon. 

The important focus shall be on the Indian girls’s cricket quarter-final in opposition to hosts Japan. Led by captain Harmanpreet Kaur, the defending Asian Games champions will start their gold-medal defence in a straight knockout fixture at Korogi Athletic Park.

India head into the Asian Games on the again of a record-extending eighth Asia Cup title, having defeated Sri Lanka within the ultimate final week, whereas Japan shall be showing within the Asian Games cricket competitors for the third time. 

Ranked third within the T20I standings, India are the highest-ranked facet within the eight-team girls’s competitors and can enter the match as one of many main contenders for the title. The match in opposition to Japan may even mark the first-ever assembly between the 2 sides.

Meanwhile, Japan face a tricky problem in opposition to a powerful Indian facet. Ranked thirty ninth within the girls’s T20I staff rankings, Japan shall be making their third look in cricket on the Asian Games. 

Their finest end in girls’s cricket on the Asian Games got here in 2010, after they gained the bronze medal. This 12 months’s competitors is being performed in a straight knockout format, leaving little room for error. (ANI)