Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: India’s Asian Games cricket squad has a new captain, a new vice-captain and a schoolboy. The selection tells you what the format has become — and what a medal now counts for.
India’s men’s cricket squad for the Asian Games in Japan is a fifteen-member side led by Shreyas Iyer, with Tilak Varma as vice-captain. Iyer, 31, takes the Twenty20 captaincy in this campaign after returning to India’s short-format set-up. The name that will travel furthest, though, belongs to Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, who is 15 — making him, on the available record, the youngest cricketer picked in any India squad for an international event.
The rest of the sheet reads like a first-choice white-ball group rather than a development side: Abhishek Sharma, Sanju Samson and Ishan Kishan as the wicketkeeping options, Shivam Dube, Nitish Kumar Reddy, Axar Patel, Washington Sundar, Varun Chakaravarthy, Ravi Bishnoi, Jasprit Bumrah, Harshit Rana and Arshdeep Singh. Sending Bumrah to a multi-sport games is itself a statement about how the fixture is now rated.
Nine days in Japan: the men’s cricket tournament at the Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games runs from 24 September to the medal matches on 3 October.
A first-choice bowling attack, a returning captain and a schoolboy in the same fifteen. India is not treating this tournament as an exhibition.
At a Glance
• Games: Asian Games, Aichi-Nagoya, Japan, 19 September – 4 October 2026
• Men’s cricket: 24 September to 3 October, medal matches on the final day
• Captain: Shreyas Iyer · Vice-captain: Tilak Varma
• Youngest pick: Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, 15
• Wicketkeepers: Sanju Samson, Ishan Kishan
• Pace: Jasprit Bumrah, Arshdeep Singh, Harshit Rana
• Spin: Varun Chakaravarthy, Ravi Bishnoi, Axar Patel, Washington Sundar
• Batting: Abhishek Sharma, Shivam Dube, Nitish Kumar Reddy
• Squad size: 15
There is a structural reason a full-strength side is going. Cricket’s return to the multi-sport programme gives the sport a medal-table value it does not otherwise carry, and for a country that finished its last Commonwealth campaign counting golds by discipline, a cricket medal is worth exactly as much as any other. That changes selection incentives: a board that once rested its senior players through such fixtures now has a reason not to.
The Sooryavanshi selection is the one to watch rather than to celebrate prematurely. Picking a 15-year-old is a bet on temperament as much as on technique, and Indian cricket’s record with very young players is mixed enough to counsel patience from spectators and protection from the management. The constructive frame is straightforward: a fifteen-year-old in a squad of fifteen is a talent-pipeline result, evidence that domestic age-group and franchise structures are surfacing players earlier than they used to. What matters now is the workload plan around him, and the willingness to leave him out if the tournament asks for something he is not yet ready to give. India travels in September. The medal matches are on 3 October.
