The Pakistan Cricket Board has unveiled a heavily restructured fifteen player squad for the upcoming 2026 Asian Games scheduled to take place in Aichi Nagoya, Japan. Aggressive top order batsman Sahibzada Farhan has been rewarded for his record breaking performances during the 2026 T20 World Cup campaign and will lead the national team as captain, while former skipper Salman Ali Agha has been stripped of the captaincy and omitted from the T20I lineup entirely.

The selected roster reflects a major youth movement by the selectors, with iconic stars such as Babar Azam, Shaheen Afridi, and Shadab Khan completely left out of the continental tournament.

New Leadership and Fresh Faces in the Roster

The newly configured side introduces Abdul Samad as the team vice captain to serve as Farhan’s primary deputy. While Farhan brings the experience of appearing in 46 T20Is for Pakistan, this assignment will mark his initial stint captaining the national side in white ball cricket. Samad has accumulated five T20I caps throughout his career but has not featured for Pakistan in the shortest international format since March of last year, though he was recently integrated into the ODI squad during the tour of Australia.

The selection committee has named Usman Khan as the frontline wicketkeeper for a squad that looks vastly different from the group fielded during the T20 World Cup earlier this year. To inject fresh talent, four uncapped players who have yet to make their T20I debuts for Pakistan have been integrated into the mix: Akif Javed, Ali Raza, Maaz Sadaqat, and Saad Masood. Javed earned his spot on the flight to Japan following a string of highly impressive performances as a left arm speedster in the ongoing T20 Blast.

Training Camp Timeline and Historical Context

The collective roster represents a highly unified development group, with 14 out of the 15 chosen squad members already participating in the National Cricket Academy white ball conditioning camp, which is slated to commence in Lahore on June 15.

The full 15 member Pakistan squad traveling to Japan consists of:

Sahibzada Farhan (c)

Abdul Samad (vc)

Abrar Ahmed

Ahmed Daniyal

Akif Javed

Ali Raza

Arafat Minhas

Haider Ali

Hasan Nawaz

Maaz Sadaqat

Mohammad Salman Mirza

Saad Masood

Saim Ayub

Sufyan Muqeem

Usman Khan (wk)

The men’s cricket discipline at the Asian Games will be contested using the official T20 format, with matches scheduled to take place at the Korogi Athletic Park located within the Aichi prefecture. The competitive schedule runs from September 24 through October 3, starting with three days of preliminary pool matches before advancing into the quarter finals. The critical semi final fixtures are set for October 1, culminating in both the bronze medal match and the gold medal final on October 3.

This tournament marks the fourth instance of cricket being featured at the Asian Games, following its inclusion at Guangzhou 2010, Incheon 2014, and Hangzhou 2022 which was held in 2023. The previous edition in Hangzhou was historic as the first to be granted official international status by the ICC, where India secured the gold medal in both the men’s and women’s divisions, while Afghanistan claimed the silver medal and Bangladesh took home the bronze. Pakistan will be aiming for a stronger showing this year after finishing in a disappointing fourth place during the last edition, where they managed only a single victory alongside two defeats.

India Squad 

Shreyas Iyer (captain), Tilak Varma (vice-captain), Abhishek Sharma, Sanju Samson (wicketkeeper), Ishan Kishan (wicketkeeper), Shivam Dube, Nitish Kumar Reddy, Axar Patel, Washington Sundar, Varun Chakaravarthy, Ravi Bishnoi, Jasprit Bumrah, Harshit Rana, Arshdeep Singh, Vaibhav Sooryavanshi.