Asian Games in Japan: Converting venues reveals the real expense of cricket’s global growth

That tension is now playing out in Japan, where some of Asia’s leading cricket boards have raised concerns about the pitch and player accommodation ahead of the Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya. The venue in Nisshin, east of Nagoya, was a baseball ground until only a few months ago and was converted for cricket ahead of the tournament.

The concerns are unusually basic for a tournament that will feature some of the biggest names in Asian cricket. The pitch is a recently installed hybrid surface with limited match history, the venue does not have conventional dressing rooms, and players could be required to share hotel rooms that may leave little space for cricket kitbags.

The Asian Cricket Council is now expected to send representatives to inspect the venue and accommodation after the Pakistan Cricket Board first raised concerns at an ACC meeting.

But the issue is larger than one venue in Japan. It raises a question that cricket will increasingly have to answer as it expands into countries where the sport does not have a permanent infrastructure base: what does it actually cost to make a non-cricket venue capable of hosting international cricket?

That question became particularly visible during the T20 World Cup 2024 in the United States, where cricket was taken into baseball stadiums and temporary venues in a country without a mature cricket-stadium network.

The US tournament demonstrated that existing sporting infrastructure can be repurposed for cricket. It also demonstrated that doing so successfully requires considerably more than simply preparing a pitch.

The American solution was to use drop in pitches

For the T20 World Cup 2024, the International Cricket Council and its partners used drop-in pitches at venues including Nassau County International Cricket Stadium in New York. The concept is deceptively simple.

Instead of permanently converting a baseball or multi-purpose field into a cricket square, the pitch is prepared elsewhere, transported to the venue and installed shortly before the tournament. The advantage is obvious for an event such as a World Cup.

The host does not have to permanently redesign an existing stadium for a sport that may only use it for a handful of days. But drop-in pitches are not a shortcut around cricket infrastructure.

They require specialised pitch preparation, transport, installation, curing and maintenance. The soil composition, grass, moisture, rolling and preparation have to be controlled well before the pitch reaches the stadium.

The US tournament offered an important lesson for cricket’s expansion into non-traditional markets: temporary infrastructure can work, but only when the temporary system itself is highly sophisticated. Japan is attempting a different model.

At Korogi Sports Park, the cricket surface has been created within a former baseball facility. The square uses a hybrid surface, mostly natural grass with polyethylene fibres incorporated into it.

The venue even retains a baseball pitcher’s mound. That is not necessarily a problem in itself. Multi-purpose sporting venues are increasingly common around the world.

The challenge is whether the cricket surface has had enough time and competitive use to establish predictable playing characteristics.

A pitch is an infrastructure asset, not just a patch of grass

This is where cricket differs from many field sports. A football pitch can be installed relatively quickly and still provide a broadly standardised playing surface. Cricket pitches are more complicated because the surface directly influences the contest between bat and ball.

Pace, bounce, seam movement, spin and deterioration can all change depending on the construction and preparation of the pitch. That becomes especially important in T20 cricket, where teams build strategies around expected conditions.

Japan’s venue was made cricket-ready only in March and hosted the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup East Asia-Pacific Qualifier in May. That provides some competitive experience, but it is still a relatively short testing window before an Asian Games tournament involving teams such as India and Pakistan.

The issue is therefore not simply whether the pitch is “good” or “bad”. It is whether teams can predict how it will behave. For elite cricket, predictability itself has economic value.

Teams spend millions of dollars across coaching, analytics, preparation, travel and player contracts. A pitch that has not been sufficiently tested introduces another variable into that investment.

The US experience showed the cost of getting this wrong

The 2024 T20 World Cup in the US provides a useful comparison because the tournament faced the same fundamental challenge: cricket was being played in a country whose major sporting infrastructure had not been designed around cricket. But the response was built around a different level of preparation.

At Nassau County, a temporary stadium was constructed and drop-in pitches were prepared specifically for the tournament. The approach allowed the organisers to create a cricket venue without asking the host to permanently build a cricket stadium.

It was expensive but it was also a form of infrastructure flexibility. Japan’s Asian Games approach is closer to conversion than replacement. That difference matters.

A drop-in pitch allows organisers to control the most important cricket-specific asset away from the venue and then bring it in. A newly converted hybrid square asks the venue itself to become cricket infrastructure. For countries where cricket is still emerging, the latter can appear cheaper.

But the calculation cannot stop at construction. There is the cost of testing, pitch maintenance, specialist groundskeeping and changing rooms. In addition, there are practice facilities, nets, equipment-storage areas, broadcast requirements, drainage and irrigation systems.

And then there is the accommodation required to support professional teams. Japan’s experience shows why all of these pieces matter.

The kitbag problem sounds trivial. It isn’t.

The concerns over hotel rooms in Nagoya may appear almost comical when placed alongside the scale of an Asian Games. But cricket has an unusually large equipment footprint. A professional cricketer does not arrive with a small sports bag.

A player may carry multiple bats, protective equipment, shoes, clothing, training equipment and other personal gear. A team also needs space for medical and support equipment.

The problem becomes more pronounced when two players are expected to share a small room.

The accommodation issue therefore becomes another example of a larger problem: sports infrastructure is designed around the specific requirements of the athletes using it. A hotel that works perfectly for a swimmer or footballer may not work as efficiently for a cricket team.

That is particularly relevant to cricket because international teams travel with increasingly large support staffs. Head coaches, assistant coaches, analysts, physiotherapists, strength and conditioning specialists, doctors and logistics personnel have become part of the modern cricket ecosystem.

The playing field is only one part of the infrastructure.

Japan is an interesting test for cricket’s Asian expansion

Japan’s challenge is also significant because the country is not simply hosting an isolated exhibition. Cricket is part of the Asian Games programme and India are sending high-profile men’s and women’s teams.

The men’s side includes players such as Jasprit Bumrah and Vaibhav Suryavanshi, with Shreyas Iyer expected to lead the team. The women’s side is led by Harmanpreet Kaur. That creates a sharp contrast between the maturity of the participating cricket teams and the relative newness of the infrastructure being used to host them.

For Japan, the tournament is an opportunity to expose a much wider audience to cricket. For cricket too, it is an opportunity to demonstrate that the sport can operate outside its traditional infrastructure markets. But the success of that experiment will depend on whether organisers can make a temporary or adapted venue feel like a professional cricket environment.

The economics of cricket’s global expansion

There is an important financial question underneath all of this. Cricket’s expansion is often discussed through the lens of media rights, sponsorships, broadcast audiences and new markets. The infrastructure side receives considerably less attention.

Yet entering a new market requires somebody to pay for the physical ecosystem. A host country can construct a permanent cricket stadium, but that creates a major capital expenditure for a sport that may not yet have enough domestic demand to justify it.

Alternatively, it can retrofit baseball, football or other sporting facilities. That reduces the permanent capital requirement but creates operating costs every time cricket arrives. Or it can use modular infrastructure and drop-in pitches. That shifts the economics again, replacing permanent construction with specialised logistics.

For cricket’s administrators, this is potentially a crucial part of the global-growth model. Cricket can be hosted economically or not can be a crucial determinant.

The model cricket may increasingly need

The US and Japan represent two different answers to the same problem. The US leaned heavily on temporary, purpose-built infrastructure, including drop-in pitches, to bring international cricket into existing sporting markets.

Japan is using adapted existing infrastructure, turning a baseball facility into a cricket venue. Neither model is inherently superior. The appropriate solution depends on the size of the tournament, expected frequency of cricket, local sporting infrastructure and the ability of organisers to invest in specialist facilities.

For a one-off event, permanent construction can be difficult to justify. For a country seeking to build a domestic cricket ecosystem, a permanent facility may make more economic sense. A multi-sport event may look at conversion as the most practical option.

But the Japanese experience underlines one principle that cricket’s expansion strategy cannot ignore: you cannot globalise the sport simply by globalising the fixtures.

You need grounds that can withstand elite cricket, accommodation that can support professional teams, training facilities that meet international standards and local staff who understand the sport.

The US showed that money and specialist expertise can create that ecosystem temporarily. Japan is testing whether an existing sports ecosystem can be adapted quickly enough to do the same.

That distinction could become increasingly important as cricket looks beyond its traditional strongholds and towards the Olympic Games, Asian Games and new international markets.

The next phase of cricket’s global expansion may therefore be measured not only in the number of countries playing the game but in how efficiently those countries can build the infrastructure required to host it.