62 Matches, 23 Teams in Ahmedabad — and One Question: Who Is This Commonwealth Kabaddi Championship Actually For?

Sixty-two matches. Thirty-nine men's, twenty-three women's.

I pulled out the calculator, because nine years in this trade has given me one habit I refuse to drop: check the arithmetic before you read the press release. It added up. Thirteen men's teams in two groups — seven and six. Six matches per team in the seven-team group, so twenty-one; fifteen in the six-team group; thirty-six total. Add two semifinals and a final, and you get thirty-nine. On the women's side, two groups of five produce twenty group games; add two semis and a final and you get twenty-three. Sixty-two. The maths is clean, and the maths being clean should have been the headline. It isn't.

Now run the same arithmetic against the thing nobody wants to talk about. Twenty-three of sixty-two is thirty-seven per cent. That is the share of this championship handed to the women's competition — the competition whose national team has won every single women's kabaddi gold ever contested at the Asian Games: 2026, 2026, 2026, 2026. Four from four. And which has no franchise league of its own. Thirty-seven per cent of the matches, zero per cent of the league. That is the number I am building this entire nine-day file around, and I know the organisers will not enjoy the framing.

Thursday evening, 22 October, Ahmedabad. The mats are down at the Veer Savarkar Sports Complex, thirteen flags are on the board, and at eleven tomorrow morning Kenya meet Singapore to start the thing. I am not there. I am writing this from Delhi off a fixture list, a squad list and a calendar, and it is worth saying plainly what this piece rests on: the numbers released by the organisers. Everything else is my arithmetic, and where I am inferring, I will say so.

Context: nine days, two mats, one bid

The tournament runs 23 to 31 October — nine days. The Amateur Kabaddi Federation of India is organising it with the approval of the International Kabaddi Federation. Twenty-three teams from thirteen nations. It is the inaugural edition, so the word 'first' will be used repeatedly, and I think that word is both its greatest strength and its structural weakness. Strength because a first edition always enters the record. Weakness because first editions tend to be designed by circumstance rather than by thought.

The men's draw has thirteen teams in two groups. Group A: India, Nigeria, Malaysia, Uganda, England, Tanzania and Sri Lanka — seven teams. Group B: Bangladesh, Kenya, Canada, Australia, Scotland and Singapore — six. India open against England on Friday, 23 October at 8:30 PM, then face Uganda (24 October), Malaysia (25), Nigeria (26), Tanzania (27) and Sri Lanka (29 October). There is no Indian group fixture on 28 October.

The women's draw has ten teams in two groups of five. Group A: India, Singapore, Nigeria, Uganda, Malaysia. Group B: Bangladesh, Kenya, England, Scotland, Sri Lanka. Nidhi Sharma captains the Indian women's side, with Ritu as vice-captain. Muskan Sharma, Riya Kumari, Simran Kamboj and Karthika Ramesh are in the squad. India's women open against Malaysia at 6:45 PM on the same Friday, then play Singapore (24 October), Uganda (25) and Nigeria (26).

The men's squad is fourteen strong. Surjeet Singh captains, Naveen Kumar is vice-captain, and the group includes Sachin Tanwar, Pankaj Mohite, Bharat Hooda, Shubham Shinde and Parvesh Bhainswal. Seven will start on the mat; seven will sit. That ratio matters enormously, as we will see.

The top two from each group reach the semifinals on 30 October. Both finals are on 31 October. And the reason this whole event exists is not printed in the fixture list but sits in the middle of every press release: Ahmedabad's 2030 Commonwealth Games bid.

Core: the opponent nobody is watching is the calendar

The most honest document at any multi-sport event is not the format sheet. It is the calendar. A calendar cannot lie, because someone had to count the hours to write it.

If the thirty-six men's group matches are spread across 23 to 29 October — and India's own fixture list suggests a seven-day men's group stage — that is an average of more than five men's matches a day. The twenty women's group matches sit across four days, 23 to 26 October, which is five a day. Between 23 and 26 October, both competitions run simultaneously. Add it up: roughly ten matches a day for those four days. First match at 11 AM, last at 8:30 PM. A nine-and-a-half-hour window. Ten matches, nine and a half hours. That is fifty-odd minutes per match including warm-up, toss, presentation and mopping the mat.

That calculation is mine, not an official schedule. But even if it is only roughly right, this championship's real opponent is not a team. It is the clock. And the clock will cut first at the teams that do not have fourteen players — the Tanzanias, the Ugandas, the Canadas, the Scotlands who travel with seven or eight. For them, playing daily is not fatigue management. It is injury arithmetic.

India has the one luxury the other twenty-two teams do not: depth. Four raiders who would start for almost anyone — Naveen Kumar, Sachin Tanwar, Pankaj Mohite, Bharat Hooda — plus a defence built around Surjeet Singh, Shubham Shinde and Parvesh Bhainswal. Seven on, seven off means half the squad is rotation. But having room to rotate and actually rotating are two very different things.

In 2026, when everything was cancelled, I rewatched about 180 PKL matches across three seasons and hand-charted six hundred do-or-die raids — raider, tackle type, outcome, minute. One pattern kept surfacing: do-or-die conversion falls after the third or fourth match, and the fall tracks the raider's legs more than his skill. A spreadsheet can hold six hundred do-or-die raids and still miss the point — but it does not miss this: the man raiding on the fifth consecutive day is not the man who raided on day one.

Put India's men's fixtures on that same sheet. 23, 24, 25, 26, 27 — five straight days. Rest on 28. Sri Lanka on 29. Semifinal on 30. Final on 31. If India go all the way, that is nine matches in nine days, seven of them without a proper break. That is a harsher schedule than most T20 tournaments, because kabaddi has no bowler to rest. Seven men are on the mat and every one of them either does something or stops something on every raid.

Now the detail that actually bothers me. India play Sri Lanka on 29 October — the day before the semifinal. Seven teams in Group A, top two advance. India do not need to win the group; they need to be in the top two. So if India have won everything by 29 October, the Sri Lanka fixture looks like a dead rubber — and that is precisely the trap. You rest five or six men because the semifinal is the next day. You lose. You go into the semifinal as group runners-up, which means you meet the winner of Group B. And the winner of Group B is, almost certainly, Bangladesh.

Bangladesh are the second-most overlooked team in this field. Group B contains Kenya, Canada, Australia, Scotland and Singapore; on paper none of them should trouble Bangladesh. Which means Bangladesh can rest everyone and arrive fresh for the semifinal, while India arrive having fought Sri Lanka the previous evening. The rest before the semifinal belongs to Bangladesh; the calendar belongs to India. That asymmetry never shows up in a scoreline. It shows up in a trophy lift.

The women's calendar is the mirror image. Four matches in four days — 23, 24, 25, 26 — then 27, 28 and 29 completely free of group fixtures, then the semifinal on 30 October. Technically that is a superb setup for Nidhi Sharma's side: a three-day break before the knockout.

But stay on that thought. If the group stage is four games in four days against Malaysia, Singapore, Uganda and Nigeria, then the real test does not begin until 30 October. Four matches, three days off, one semifinal. That is a pre-season schedule, not a championship one. And that is when the thirty-seven per cent becomes clear for what it is: a count of fixtures, not a measure of contest.

Core: thirty-seven per cent of the matches, zero per cent of the league

Here is one football comparison, held to two sentences, then back to kabaddi. The loan-with-obligation-to-buy deal is financial self-harm for small clubs: they develop a player, pay his wages, and the moment he is ready a bigger club collects him at a pre-agreed price, leaving the small club with neither the player nor the right to price him. This championship is that deal in tournament form — India lend their brand to twelve nations, and the obligation triggers in 2030 when everyone assumes India will simply be there. Right. Back to kabaddi.

Women's kabaddi owns four Asian Games golds and not one franchise league. I first wrote that sentence at twenty-two and assumed it was a slogan. I now write it as a data point, because it is one. Men's kabaddi has a PKL auction that turns railway clerks and police constables into crorepatis, and that is genuinely the best story in Indian sport's recent economics — I will defend it any day. But it is only half the story. The other half is that the women's team which won Asia four times from four never got a market built for it.

Nobody at this tournament is being paid an auction price. The currency here is a cap, not a contract. Twenty-three teams, thirteen nations, nine days — and most of these athletes are playing on the back of a railways, police or bank job in their own country. India is partly the exception, because the squad contains genuine PKL names. For the players from Canada, Scotland, Australia, Tanzania and Uganda, this tournament functions as employment, not honour. And for the women's teams, whichever flag they carry, it is almost always employment.

At seventeen, in Delhi, I did not own a phone. I borrowed my cousin's Redmi, screen-recorded fourteen Pardeep Narwal dubki escapes, cut them into a forty-seven-second vertical with a counter in the corner, and posted it at eleven on a school night. Two hundred-odd comments showed up, half of them arguing whether the dubki was skill or a gimmick. The phone was borrowed, the haircut was mine, and the rumour did the rest — but that night taught me the foundation of everything I do: you can only argue about what you can count. The dubki still does not appear in a counting column. Raid success rate does. And that asymmetry is the most honest portrait of this championship.

Core: four new teams and an old turf war

Canada, Australia, Scotland and England. Their presence here is, on paper, the biggest global-expansion story kabaddi has. I will accept that, provided we also say which kabaddi they are playing. Circle style and standard style are two bureaucracies claiming the same word. The Commonwealth Games, the Asian Games and the World Championship all play standard style — seven players, one mat, thirty-second raids, a bonus line, do-or-die. The kabaddi people grew up with in Punjab and Tamil Nadu villages is a different animal.

When Canada or Scotland step onto the mat against India, they are not just facing Bharat Hooda. They are facing a rule-set they have watched on television and read about in a manual, but have never lived at speed. The bonus-line call, the foot in the lobby, the thirty-second do-or-die clock — those three things break new nations first, and that is exactly where my worry sits.

Why? Because sixty-two matches have to be finished in nine days, and when you are clearing ten matches a day, referee patience becomes a finite resource. I want to see whether the third umpire at India's first Commonwealth kabaddi championship becomes the match's editor or its witness. If bonus-line calls start going to video referral, if every tackle triggers a lobby check, the confidence of the new nations dies in match one — and the tournament becomes a list of margins by which India beat people. In any sport where the referee becomes the editor, attacking instinct dies first. I learned that from millimetre offside lines in football, and kabaddi is walking the same road.

Core: these nine days are a rehearsal for 2030

The thing the organisers downplay most and which matters most: this championship sits under the shadow of Ahmedabad's 2030 Commonwealth Games bid. So it is not just an event. It is an examination, and the question paper reads: can one city absorb sixty-two kabaddi matches, twenty-three teams, thirteen nations, two mats and ten matches a day across nine days?

Nobody has the answer yet, but there are three parts of the question I will grade after 31 October. First, mat quality — Ahmedabad humidity makes indoor mats greasy, and a mat behaves differently after ten matches in a day. Second, medical turnaround — nine days, sixty-two matches, and one serious injury goes straight into the bid file. Third, the crowd. And this is where my deepest doubt lives.

The arithmetic of sixty-two matches only succeeds if the stands are full. If the India-England match on the evening of 23 October shows more empty seats than occupied ones, the most honest report on this whole event will not be in a scorecard. It will be in a photograph. Kabaddi's real strength is not a mat; it is a field — the mud where spectators sit at the edge and count raids out loud. Move it into an air-conditioned hall and you have to bring the noise with it. Otherwise kabaddi becomes the quietest contact sport in the world, and that has never been what it is.

Contrarian: where I could be wrong

I know my weakest ground, so let me state it plainly.

One. Iran and South Korea are not here. I am not writing this as a conspiracy, because it isn't one — neither country is a Commonwealth member, so their absence is structural, not political. But it has a consequence that cannot be hidden: in a sport where Iran and Korea have been India's real rivals for eight years, a Commonwealth Championship can never be a test against the world's best. I call that a boundary, not a weakness. And my standing rule is to name Iran as co-favourite in every preview whether they are entered or not — because in the Jakarta 2026 semifinal India lost 18-27, and the cause was selection, not talent.

Two. My calendar arithmetic — ten matches a day, fifty minutes per match — is inference, not an official schedule. If the organisers run two mats simultaneously, those ten matches compress into four or five hours and my entire anxiety evaporates. I accept that, and it is the first thing I will check on the morning of 23 October.

Three, and most importantly. It is entirely possible that Indian dominance is not this tournament's flaw but its whole purpose. If Tanzania and Uganda have to lose to India by forty points, their federations get a number for next year's funding application: we played at world level. That argument sounds cheap, and it is not wrong. I once mistook being noticed for being right and the thread kept the receipts; after that lesson I will not claim one-sided matches have no value. Their value is not on the scoreboard. It is in next year's budget line.

Four. My biggest omission may be this: I have said almost nothing about the Indian women's players beyond listing their names. The reason is honest — I do not have charted data on them. I cannot quote a raid success rate for Nidhi Sharma, Ritu, Muskan Sharma, Riya Kumari, Simran Kamboj or Karthika Ramesh with the confidence I bring to PKL numbers, because the public data base for women's kabaddi is thinner than the men's. And that is the real charge in this piece: I lack the numbers to argue about women's kabaddi because nobody thought it worth counting them.

Takeaway: three dates, three bets

I keep a private error log — every wrong call dated and graded. It reminds me that a prediction is only worth something if it can be checked. So: three dates, three bets, all public.

30 October, semifinal night. How many of India's starting seven will be the same faces that started against England on 23 October? My bet: five or more. If it is four or fewer, Surjeet Singh and the team management read the calendar more seriously than the scoreline — and I will accept I was wrong.

31 October, final evening. If India's women are in that final and more than half the seats at the Veer Savarkar Sports Complex are empty, then all sixty-two matches will have proven one thing: we built a tournament, not an atmosphere. If the stands are full, I will write on this same date next year that kabaddi's first real league will be built around a women's team, not a franchise.

Over the next nine days, count one thing. Every match in which no do-or-die raid is attempted in the last five minutes. I think that number clears twenty out of sixty-two. The day a kabaddi tournament treats that figure as its biggest shame rather than its statistic, the sport will have moved forward in any sense that matters. Until then, Ahmedabad has twenty-three teams, thirteen flags and one bid — all of it in the name of a sport whose greatest strength is still buried in the mud.