Commonwealth Kabaddi in Ahmedabad: 62 matches, 13 nations, and the teams that will not be on this mat

Thursday afternoon, Ahmedabad. At the Veer Savarkar Sports Complex the new mat was being rolled out and the scoreboard was glowing 00-00 in a test run. A staffer re-chalked the white line along the lobby; another straightened the first row of chairs. At eleven on Friday morning the first match on this mat will be Kenya against Singapore — a men's Group B fixture that will probably get nobody's prime time. Later, at 6:45 PM, Nidhi Sharma's women's team meets Malaysia; at 8:30 PM, Surjeet Singh's men meet England.

The first thing I asked for was not the squad list but the schedule sheet. In any ten-day tournament the real story is not written on day one; it is written into the legs on day four — and in kabaddi, fatigue shows up last on a raider's wrist and first in the speed of his decisions.

This is the first Commonwealth Kabaddi Championship: nine days, October 23 to 31, 2026, 23 teams from 13 nations, 62 matches — 39 men's, 23 women's. The Amateur Kabaddi Federation of India is organising it with the approval of the International Kabaddi Federation, and the city is reading it as a rehearsal for the 2030 Commonwealth Games bid.

The men's draw has 13 teams in two groups. Group A holds India, Nigeria, Malaysia, Uganda, England, Tanzania and Sri Lanka; Group B holds Bangladesh, Kenya, Canada, Australia, Scotland and Singapore. The women's draw has ten teams in two groups of five: India sit in Group A with Singapore, Nigeria, Uganda and Malaysia, while Bangladesh, Kenya, England, Scotland and Sri Lanka make up Group B.

India's men's squad runs 14 deep — captain Surjeet Singh, vice-captain Naveen Kumar, with Sachin Tanwar, Pankaj Mohite, Bharat Hooda, Shubham Shinde and Parvesh Bhainswal alongside. Nidhi Sharma captains the women, Ritu is her vice-captain, and the squad also carries Muskan Sharma, Riya Kumari, Simran Kamboj and Karthika Ramesh. The top two from each group reach the semifinals on October 30; both finals are on October 31.

The first thing the schedule sheet tells you is that its arithmetic closes — and I always check that first, because a format whose sums are wrong usually has an intention that is wrong too. Seven teams in Group A produce 21 group matches; six in Group B produce 15; add two semifinals and a final and you get 39. Two groups of five on the women's side produce 20, plus two semifinals and a final, and you get 23. The sums hold.

And it is exactly where the sums hold that the story sits. India's men play six group games: England on October 23, Uganda on October 24, Malaysia on October 25, Nigeria on October 26, Tanzania on October 27 — five straight days — then a rest day on October 28 and Sri Lanka on October 29. The women play four group games across four straight days: Malaysia on the 23rd, Singapore on the 24th, Uganda on the 25th, Nigeria on the 26th; after that they sit idle for three full days until the semifinals on October 30. Group B teams play five group games, Group A teams six. One group has been handed an extra match inside the same nine days, and that group is India's. Tie-breaks in the standings usually fall to score difference, and in a six-match group that margin grows large — which means every Indian win now carries a second question: by how much.

Five straight days inside a seven-team group — this tournament is not a test of form but a test of rotation.

Since 2026 I have watched every season twice on tape, and the same thing surfaces each time: in a run of back-to-back matches the raider loses his dubki first and his cover's side-tackle after that. The dubki count was never about numbers; it was about nerve — and nerve does not thin on the fifth day, it merely becomes expensive to spend. Even with three raiders of the quality of Naveen Kumar, Sachin Tanwar and Pankaj Mohite, a 14-man squad is 14 on paper and 12 on the mat; the third raider's do-or-die raid is where captaincy actually gets examined. Surjeet Singh's hardest call will not come on day one but on day three — whom he rests against Malaysia on October 25.

The arithmetic runs the other way for the women. Four matches in four days, then a long gap. For a coach that is not comfortable: rhythm has to be built inside four days and then preserved across three idle ones. The real question for Nidhi Sharma and Ritu is whether they field their strongest seven against Nigeria on October 26 or hold something back for the semifinal. Teams like Nigeria play on physical stamina, and sending a weakened line-up against them is the most expensive gamble on the sheet.

Then there is the shape of the field. The Commonwealth's boundaries decide, before a single raid, who will not be here. Iran is not a Commonwealth member, nor South Korea, nor Thailand, nor Chinese Taipei, nor Japan — which is to say the teams that troubled India most over the past decade are nowhere on this mat. At Jakarta 2026 India lost 23-24 to South Korea in the group and 18-27 to Iran in the semifinal. Neither result can repeat here, because neither team is here. Pakistan is absent from the list as well, a Commonwealth member with an old kabaddi rivalry against India.

The empty stadium taught me that absence has nine rooms — and here the absence is not in empty chairs but in empty slots in the draw. What remains is Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Kenya and England. Bangladesh and Sri Lanka can generate genuine pressure in the raiding phases; Kenya's fitness makes them more dangerous than their seeding; England arrive with a system built in their domestic league, and the first-day benefit of that system could land squarely on India. In Group B, Bangladesh against Kenya will settle the second semifinal berth.

I rewound the tape until the crowd disappeared from the frame — and what is left once the crowd goes is only structure: who wins the third tackle, who takes the do-or-die raid, whose foot lands first on the lobby line. That structure is what matters for India here, because a title will be decided by the habit of the third tackle, not by the noise of one evening.

On kabaddi's place at the 2030 Commonwealth Games: the question will arrive in every conversation around this tournament, and I would rather be plain about it. Kabaddi is not an Olympic sport, and this championship will not make it one. Adding a sport to a Commonwealth Games programme is decided not by a host city's enthusiasm but by federation politics and the size of the membership. The men's draw here has 13 nations, and real depth in perhaps four or five of them. The ambition belongs to the federation, not to the future — I will attribute it that way and go no further.

The actual examination begins after October 31: how many of those 13 nations go home with a coach, a referee and a junior structure. If the answer is close to none, this tournament is decoration rather than development — and the same 23 teams will return next time in the same shape.

And one number speaks louder than any speech: 23 of the 62 matches belong to the women. Ten teams against thirteen. The 6:45 PM slot is theirs, the 8:30 PM slot is the men's. The women's draw has been kept smaller and handed the earlier evening slot; for a sport routinely described as equal, the timetable declares its priorities before the first whistle.

What comes next. Semifinals on October 30, both finals on October 31, the same day. For me the real matches sit earlier: India's men on their fifth straight day against Tanzania on October 27, and the women's fourth against Nigeria on October 26. Those two evenings will tell us whether a list of 14 names is a team or a queue. In Jakarta I learned that silence after the whistle has syntax; this time the thing worth listening for is which sound survives in the hall on the night of October 31 — the applause, or a set of numbers that can be repeated next year.

At 10:40 on Friday morning the mat will be empty, Kenya and Singapore will be warming up, and the board will still be blinking 00-00. I am going to watch those ten minutes, because I have always written the pause between the roar and the replay, not the roar.