The Asian Games 2023 is finally happening with the opening ceremony scheduled to take place on September 23 in Hangzhou, China.

The games will run through to October 8 and will include a total of 40 sports across 61 disciplines at 56 venues.

The games were originally scheduled to take place last year but were postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The General Directorate of Physical Education and Sports of Afghanistan announced on Tuesday that the country’s athletes in athletics, boxing, Kurash, weightlifting and wrestling left Kabul on Tuesday for China.

It is believed other athletes will depart Kabul on Wednesday for the Asian Games in Hangzhou.

Host-nation China will start the games as the most successful nation, having won 3,187 medals in the history of the Asian Games, which includes 1,473 gold medals.

Meanwhile, the Asian Games Village for Hangzhou 2023 was officially opened on Saturday as teams started arriving.

Earlier this month, Reuters reported that 17 Afghan female athletes, who are living in exile, including a women’s volleyball team, will participate. However, the Islamic Emirate rejected the reports at the time, and said that all athletes from Afghanistan being sent to Hangzhou are male.

The IEA has imposed strict restrictions on women and girls over the past two years, including a ban on females taking part in sport.

In a recent statement issued by Afghanistan’s General Directorate of Physical Education and Sports, 17 sports teams, including wushu, soccer, volleyball and cricket, will participate in the Hangzhou Asian Games.

Afghanistan has been invited to send a total of 17 teams, comprising 103 athletes and 23 coaches, to Hangzhou.

In an exciting turn of events, cricket will return to the upcoming Asian Games, eight years after its last inclusion in 2014 in Incheon, South Korea. The tournament will include 14 men’s teams, including a team from Afghanistan.

Scheduled to be played in the T20 format, the men’s event will be played between September 27 and October 8. Zhejiang University of Technology Pingfeng Cricket Field is the host stadium for all the matches.

India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh have already reached the quarter-finals based on their ICC T20I Rankings as of June 1, 2023, while Afghanistan, an ICC Full Member, will participate only in the men’s event. A win against Mongolia will seal a top-eight spot for the squad.

After cricket’s inception in the 2010 edition in Guangzhou, China, the sport was played in the 2014 continental event in Incheon, South Korea. The 2018 games in Jakarta, Indonesia, the previous edition of the Asian Games, did not feature cricket.

At Incheon, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh won medals in the men’s event.

The cricket teams participating at the Asian Games 2023 are India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Nepal, Mongolia, Japan, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, Maldives, Hong Kong, Thailand, Bahrain.

Sadly, Afghanistan’s football team has withdrawn from the games due to a funding crisis.

According to the latest figures produced by HAGOC, the number of athletes expected is 12,417 – over 1,000 more than the previous record of 11,300 at the 18th Asian Games in Indonesia in 2018.