Selfie time: Team India, BCCI chief Mithun Manhas and Ambassador of Japan to India Ono Keiichi bond at a get together.
| Photo Credit: X@bcci
Alan Curr remembers V.V.S. Laxman’s 281.
He was at university when Laxman played one of Test cricket’s greatest innings against Australia at the Eden Gardens in Kolkata in 2001. Twenty-five years later, Curr, now Chief Operating Officer of the Japan Cricket Association (JCA), found himself on the phone with Laxman, only this time the Indian legend was asking the questions.
Laxman, now coach of the Indian men’s team travelling to the Games, wanted to know what to expect in Japan.
“Certainly in the two or three minutes leading up to the call, you’re like, wow, I saw this guy play a lot of cricket,” Curr tells Sportstar.
The call lasted only a few minutes, but it neatly captured Japan’s changing place in the cricket world. India was no longer simply a team Curr watched from afar. It was now a team Japan had to prepare to host.
India Women begin their Asian Games campaign against the host on September 18 at Korogi Sports Park in Nisshin.
India’s players are full-time professionals with contracts and endorsements; Japan’s women remain amateur and failed to qualify for the 2022 Asian Games tournament. Yet Japan is embracing the occasion rather than fearing it.
“It is incredibly exciting, I have waited a decade to play in the Asian Games, so finally being able to compete on home soil is something special,” says captain Mai Yanagida.
The fixture has reshaped expectations for the JCA. India’s visit has driven ticket demand the federation has never recorded, forcing it to plan for security, crowds and media.
“For years, our biggest problem was finding players to come and play matches… Whereas when you’ve got India coming, then the tickets sold out in about — it felt like about 20 minutes,” Curr says.
The stakes go beyond one result. When Japan’s men made their Asian Games debut in Hangzhou three years ago and beat Cambodia, it became national news, with highlights on major television channels — cricket briefly gaining an Olympics-style ripple.
For the women, though, cricket is still a second career squeezed around work and study. Japan has only 14 clubs, and players juggle the sport with jobs, teaching or university.
“We are not full-time professional cricketers… It definitely requires a lot of personal sacrifices,” Yanagida says.
Kurumi Ota, a systems engineer at Hitachi, knows that cost. She stepped away from the sport for seven years because of work before returning.
“When I first started playing cricket, we would sometimes practise under overpasses… Today there are international-standard grounds and grass outfields,” she says.
The JCA now has a 20-year vision to grow not just players but coaches, commentators and curators.
On September 18, Japan gets its biggest cricketing stage yet.
“I mean how often do you get to say you had V.V.S Laxman talk to you about cricket,” Curr says.
Published – September 17, 2026 06:36 pm IST
