First Commonwealth Kabaddi Championship in Ahmedabad: 62 Matches, 13 Nations, and Only 23 Women's Games

On the evening of 21 October 2026 in Ahmedabad, the captains' names were read out, the jersey was unveiled, the logo and mascot appeared, the anthem played. Two days later, on 23 October 2026, the first raid of the inaugural Commonwealth Kabaddi Championship will be attempted. The press note said 13 countries, nine days, "400-plus players". What it did not say was sitting in the match schedule's arithmetic: 62 matches in all, 39 men's and 23 women's. That gap between 39 and 23 is the most honest story of this tournament, and it does not come from the colour of the jersey. It comes from the scorecard's arithmetic.

I collect arenas the way other people collect stamps — by the noise they make. There will be no such noise here. This is a different kind of event, one where the banner on the stage is more visible than the raid on the mat. I came anyway, because when the calendar goes empty I go looking for the people who used to fill it.

The All India Kabaddi Federation (AKFI) is the organiser and the International Kabaddi Federation (IKF) has sanctioned the tournament. Sanction has a practical meaning: this will be played in Standard Style, on the rectangular court — the same rule family used at the Asian Games and in the Pro Kabaddi League, not the Circle Style of the round court popular in the villages of Punjab and Haryana. Sixty-two matches across nine days works out to roughly seven a day. The semifinals are on 30 October and the finals on 31 October 2026. Men's and women's draws are separate, and that separation is the strongest institutional argument this event has.

Ahmedabad is not a new city for me. The 2026 World Cup final was played at TransStadia here — India 38-29 Iran. Since that night I have named Iran co-favourite in every preview rather than spoiler. I will do it again this time, and I will explain why that role looks weaker than usual.

Any sport bidding for a place on the Commonwealth Games programme faces one clean condition: credibility in the women's discipline. The target is 2030, and Ahmedabad is the paper being filed towards it. Read this championship as a file being filled, not merely as a tournament, and remember that files are not written by mascots.

The first question does not come from a scorecard. It comes from the match count. If the men's draw is a two-group round-robin with two semifinals and a final, then 13 teams split 7 and 6 gives 21 plus 15 group games and 3 knockouts — exactly 39. The women's 23 matches reconcile with exactly 10 teams on the same template: groups of 5 and 5, ten plus ten group games and 3 knockouts. Which means roughly three of the 13 nations are not sending women's teams at all. That is not an estimate; it is subtraction, and it is the single most revealing audit figure of this event.

The second number hits in the opposite direction. The press note says 400-plus players. Divide by 13 countries and you get about 31 per nation. That only works if every one of the 13 enters both genders, which collides directly with the women's match count. Either the figure is a loose estimate, or support staff have been folded into it. Either way it is a soft foundation for an organising document, and it is the kind of slip that gets expensive to correct once an international sanction is on record.

Now the court. The rule architecture is standard, so there is no adaptation cost for the Indian squad. The bonus line — that deep line in the opponent's half, worth one point provided the defending side has six or more players on the mat — will be India's cheapest weapon. Against a deep, passive defence, low-risk single-point accumulation is how strong raiding sides break weak tackling units; margins inflate without a single difficult touch being attempted.

The do-or-die rule — after two empty raids the third becomes compulsory, and failing to score on it puts the raider himself out — removes the weakest teams' best comfort: the option of burning empty raids to kill time. It makes the sport honest and it suppresses upsets. For a showcase event that is an expensive trade, because a showcase needs jeopardy more than it needs justice.

Look at the leadership. Surjeet Singh captains the men, Naveen Kumar is vice-captain; Nidhi Sharma captains the women, with Ritu as vice-captain. Surjeet Singh is an extremely common name in Indian kabaddi — both raiding and defending profiles have carried it — so inferring a role from a captaincy announcement is premature. If Naveen Kumar is the "Naveen Express" known from Dabang Delhi, the signal is clear: India has sent a genuine squad, not a development experiment. The other signal is equally clear, about what the full registered name behind "Ritu" is — shortening names is an old habit of Indian sports reporting, and it is the habit that makes statistical identification unreliable.

A line about the numbers that do not exist. Raid points, successful raid percentage, tackle points — nothing is publicly available on this tournament. What is available is a marketing-framed launch: jersey, logo, mascot, anthem. Any pre-tournament claim about squad strength is promotion, not analysis.

And one thing nobody counts: workload. Sixty-two matches in nine days, roughly seven a day. That is only manageable with multiple courts running simultaneously. For largely amateur squads with no sports-science support, it is a direct invitation to soft-tissue injury. India's rotation in the group stage will be worth watching — the real selection test is in the semifinals, not the group games.

The contrarian reading is that Ahmedabad is more of a document than a competition. And the weakest link in that document is the number nobody is looking at — the 23 women's matches. If credibility in the women's discipline is a condition for Commonwealth Games inclusion, then three nations skipping women's teams is a nail driven straight into that same file. Changing the mascot will not pull it out.

The second contrarian point is about the rules. The whole architecture is standardised, and standardisation does not narrow the India-versus-field gap; it widens it. A sport seeking entry into the Commonwealth family needs close contests; an event that manufactures wide margins through the bonus line and do-or-die becomes its own biggest opponent. Iran and others have kept betting on wrestling-based defence to close that gap; it can work across one match, not across nine days.

On 30 and 31 October, in the semifinals and final, I will be watching how much India holds back in the group stage and how much it opens in the knockout. More than that, I will be watching what shape the women's draw takes when the second edition is announced. Somewhere between the ping and the whistle, the same kid is playing — the question is how wide the stage is kept for her.