Tents for Dressing Rooms, Washrooms 500m Away — BCCI Considers Pulling Stars from Asian Games

There are cricket venues around the world where the dressing rooms are air-conditioned palaces with massage tables, ice baths, personal lockers, and baristas. The IPL has stadiums where the dugout alone costs more than most countries' annual cricket budget. The BCCI is accustomed to this world.

And then there is Kōrogi Sports Park in Aichi Prefecture, Japan — the venue for cricket at the 2026 Asian Games — where the dressing rooms are, reportedly, tents. Not temporary structures with walls and plumbing. Tents. The kind of thing you might pitch at a music festival, except at a music festival the toilets are usually closer than 500 metres away.

That is the distance the BCCI says players will need to walk — half a kilometre — to reach the nearest washroom facilities. In full kit. In September humidity. After bowling a spell. The board is not amused.

The BCCI's response has been predictably muscular. The board has announced it will send an observer to Japan to inspect conditions firsthand before the Games begin on September 19. If the facilities do not meet expectations, India could replace its full-strength squad — which includes Jasprit Bumrah, Shreyas Iyer, Tilak Varma, and 15-year-old Vaibhav Sooryavanshi — with a B team.

It is, on one level, an entirely reasonable position. International cricketers should not be asked to change in tents or jog half a kilometre to use the bathroom. On another level, it is the richest cricket board on earth threatening to downgrade its commitment to a multi-sport event because the facilities are not five-star. The Asian Cricket Council, for its part, has backed the BCCI's concerns.

Within hours, though, the threat softened. A subsequent BCCI source indicated that while the concerns are genuine, India will not actually send a B team. The originally selected squad remains in place — for now. The observer will still travel. The message, however, has been sent.

The uncomfortable truth behind this story is not that Japan has failed to build adequate cricket facilities. It is that Japan — a nation that hosts the Olympics, the Rugby World Cup, and the FIFA Club World Cup without anyone needing to walk 500 metres to a bathroom — does not have the infrastructure for a sport it barely plays. Cricket was only added to the Asian Games programme in 2022. The host nation is building from scratch, and building from scratch for a sport that is not baseball tends to produce tents.

This is cricket's recurring tension: the sport's governing bodies want global expansion, want Olympic inclusion, want cricket played at multi-sport events in new markets. But the sport's biggest board expects facilities that took decades and billions to build in India, England, and Australia. You cannot have both — not yet, anyway.

When India won gold at the 2023 Asian Games in Hangzhou, they played on purpose-built facilities in a country that had invested heavily in multi-sport infrastructure. Japan, hosting the Games for the first time in 32 years, has priorities that do not start and end with cricket. Kōrogi Sports Park is a local ground being adapted for an international event. The adaptation, it seems, extends to canvas and portable toilets.

Lost in the facilities row is the human story. Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, at 15 years and some months, is the youngest player ever selected for any Indian team at an international event. He was supposed to walk out in Japan wearing India colours for the first time in a multi-sport setting — a moment that means something different from a bilateral T20I.

If the BCCI had followed through on the B-team threat, Sooryavanshi's Asian Games debut — and potentially his exposure to a wider sporting stage — would have been replaced by a plane ticket home and a promise of 'next time.' The fact that the board walked it back suggests someone in the room understood that this event is about more than dressing-room square footage.

Bumrah, too, was set to play. At 32, this may be his only Asian Games appearance. Pulling him to make a point about tents would have been an extraordinary act of administrative self-sabotage.

The BCCI's observer is expected to travel to Nagoya in the coming days. Japan's organising committee will presumably be made aware that the world's most powerful cricket board finds their dressing rooms inadequate — a polite way of saying 'these are tents and we would like walls.' If improvements are made, the full squad travels. If not, the board has left itself room to escalate.

But the broader question lingers: what does cricket expect from new markets? If the sport wants to be at the Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028, it will face the same infrastructure gap in countries that do not have Lord's or the MCG. The BCCI's tent tantrum is understandable. It is also a preview of every facilities negotiation cricket will have as it tries to go global.

For now, Bumrah is still in the squad. Sooryavanshi is still going to Japan. And somewhere in Aichi Prefecture, someone is probably shopping for better tents.