How Mohsin Naqvi-helmed ACC has queered the pitch for cricketers at Asian Games

The BCCI is rightly concerned about the facilities and arrangements for cricketers in Aichi-Nagoya, Japan, but it is unlikely to send a ‘B’ team for the Asian Games, it is learnt. The selection committee has picked a full-strength Indian squad, led by Shreyas Iyer, for the 2026 Asiad, to be held from September 19 to October 4. The cricket matches will be played at Korogi Sports Park in Nisshin City, Aichi Prefecture, and it is said that the arrangements, from dressing-rooms to washrooms, are unsatisfactory.

Cricketers aren’t brattish. They will not raise a hue and cry about the problems. But the players deserve basic facilities. Whether they will get that is a big question, and the blame apparently lies at the feet of Asian Cricket Council (ACC), which is helmed by Mohsin Naqvi.

Naqvi, of Asia Cup trophy fame, is the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) chair. He is also Pakistan’s Interior minister. Only last month, he was laying into his own government, saying that governance in Pakistan has collapsed. “The system we are living under has collapsed whether you agree or not. Problems cannot be solved through it. If this system continues, we will still be sitting here 10 years from now discussing the same issues,” he had said, while speaking at the Pakistan Economic Summit in Islamabad. No prizes for guessing at whose behest the Interior minister was acting.

Cricket, on the face of it, is not on Naqvi’s priority list, from the PCB to the ACC. It is the ACC’s responsibility to look after the cricket teams at the Asian Games, but the issues related to facilities dawned late on the Asian cricket’s governing body. By that time, all the decent hotels around the Aichi Prefecture were taken by the other sports bodies. It left cricket in the lurch.

It is learnt that to do damage control, Naqvi sent Salman Nasser, the Pakistan Super League (PSL) CEO and adviser to the PCB chair, to Japan. But nothing could be done at the eleventh hour.

According to sources, Naqvi will hold a meeting related to PSL in London this week. The PSL is Pakistan cricket’s cash cow and there’s no problem if the PCB is mulling on increasing the number of teams in the tournament and bettering the revenue flow. But the question is whether in terms of governance, from the PCB to the ACC, Naqvi is proving to be an unmitigated disaster.

Even the former Pakistan players have started to hit out at him. “Everyone is talking about the Pakistan team, and how it is the worst touring team in the last 50 years,” former Pakistan captain Rashid Latif told Geo News after Babar Azam’s troops suffered another heavy defeat in the ongoing Test series against England at Lord’s.

Latif added: “But nobody is speaking about how the current board is the worst in the last 70 years. Nobody is talking about the worst selection committee and coaches.”

What the Naqvi-helmed ACC’s alleged incompetence has done, it has put every cricket team in trouble at the Asian Games, not only India.

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