In all honesty, Cricket isn’t really made for multi-sport events. It was never really a popular choice for such events. Perhaps this is why it became a part of Asian Games only from 2010. Bangladesh won the gold medal that year, beating Afghanistan. In the next edition, in 2014, Sri Lanka won the gold medal; Afghanistan won the silver one. And now this year, Cricket is dropped from the event, which, itself, is quite a bummer given ICC is all hellbent to make sure Cricket is included in the Olympics 2024.
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(Courtesy: Sportskeeda)
Both in 2010 and 2014, India didn’t send its women and men cricket team citing international commitments and upcoming tournaments.
Another reason why India doesn’t partake in such events is because these events fall in line with the clause of the WorldAnti-Doping Agency (WADA). BCCI has always been against such clauses that ask players for dope test. It claims that such tests are against the privacy of players.
That aside, including cricket in such multi-event sports has many technical problems. One, these matches take quite some time; even a T20 match takes more than 3 hours. Second, if the teams play on the same ground, which is very likely, the ground will start wearing off, which will hurt the teams playing in the later phase. And third, Cricket doesn’t really have a very large viewership across Asia, except for countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
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(Courtesy: Indianexpress.com)
So yeah, believe it—Asian Games 2018 isn’t the last time Cricket isn’t included in this multi-sport event. It’s almost confirmed that given the poor reception and many problems that spanned in 2010 and 2014, cricket won’t be included in the Asian Games in coming years.