First Commonwealth Kabaddi Championship in Ahmedabad: 62 Matches, 13 Nations, and the Question of 23

Ahmedabad, the evening of 21 October 2026. On stage, the Commonwealth Kabaddi Championship anthem was playing, a logo was being unveiled, a mascot was being posed for the flashbulbs, and the names of the men's captain Surjeet Singh and vice-captain Naveen Kumar were being read out. I was looking at the other corner of the screen, where the match schedule was scrolling. 62 matches in all. Thirty-nine of them men's, twenty-three women's.

On the athletics beat we had a habit — read the entry list first, the heats later. The entry list tells you how deep the field is and who is standing next to whom. In kabaddi that entry list is the match count. The sixteen-match gap between 39 and 23 spoke more clearly that evening than any sentence delivered from the podium.

I opened the notebook before I opened the laptop. The notebook had one question in it: if the women's draw has only as many matches as fit neatly into a compact group format, how many countries are simply not sending a women's team?

Context: what this tournament is, and why its arithmetic matters

The logistics are clear enough. Nine days, 23 to 31 October 2026, in Ahmedabad. Thirteen countries, 62 matches, 39 in the men's competition and 23 in the women's. Semifinals on 30 October, finals on 31 October. The organiser is the Amateur Kabaddi Federation of India, and the ruleset carries the approval of the International Kabaddi Federation. The hosts have one eye on the file that will land on the table when the programme for the 2030 Commonwealth Games is decided.

One point needs stating plainly, because it is repeatedly muddled whenever kabaddi has a big news day. Entry to a Commonwealth Games programme is not a formality. Selection typically weighs gender balance, global participation, broadcast value, anti-doping compliance and grassroots infrastructure. The first of those is the strictest. A sport whose women's discipline exists on paper but is thin on the ground has a weak file. That is why Ahmedabad is not hosting one draw this fortnight. It is hosting two, and they deserve to be counted separately.

The rules layer matters for everything that follows. This is Standard Style — the 13m by 10m rectangle, the same structure used at the Asian Games and in the Pro Kabaddi League. The raider crosses into the opposition half within a 30-second clock, touches at least one defender and returns to his own half for the point to count. Throughout the raid he must chant 'kabaddi, kabaddi' — the cant — and if the cant breaks, he is out. The defending side stops him collectively; that is the tackle. A foot on the bonus line earns a point, but only when the defending side has six or more players on court. A tackle made against three or fewer defenders is a Super Tackle, worth two. After two consecutive empty raids the third becomes compulsory — do-or-die — and if that one is also empty, the raider himself is out. When an entire side is dismissed, the opponent gets two points and the whole team is revived: the All Out, the mechanism that gives kabaddi its characteristic scoring lurches.

Core: the arithmetic that actually fits

Back to the count I was watching from the wings. If the men's draw has thirteen teams split across two groups — seven and six — the group stage produces 21 plus 15, thirty-six matches. Add two semifinals and a final and you get exactly 39. No spare fixture, no padding. Now the women's draw. Twenty-three matches require ten teams — five and five producing 10 plus 10, twenty group games, then three knockouts, exactly 23.

That is the hardest and least-quoted fact in this whole story: the arithmetic says roughly three of the thirteen nations are entering men's teams and not women's teams. I am holding this as a hypothesis rather than proof, because the group compositions have not been published and the format has not been confirmed. But when arithmetic lands this cleanly twice over, it becomes a kind of evidence in itself. Two different match totals for two different competitions, both falling out of the same simple formula, is not coincidence.

The implication is uncomfortable for the people building the 2030 file. The strongest part of the case — women's kabaddi, with four Asian Games golds — is the thinnest draw at the event built to make that case. Anyone on a programme committee who picks up the Ahmedabad schedule will not read 62 first. They will read 23, and they will ask where the other three went.

Then there is the second number, which does not reconcile at all. The launch material cites '400-plus players.' Divided across thirteen countries that is roughly 31 per nation, which only works if every country enters both genders and every squad carries fifteen or sixteen — twenty-six squads in total. But twenty-six squads would mean a women's draw of thirteen teams, not ten, and a women's match count well above 23. The two figures cannot stand together.

One of three things is true: the 400-plus includes support staff and officials, or some nations are sending diaspora and development squads outside the main draw, or the women's format differs from my reconstruction. Until the official squad lists appear, that figure should not be printed without a footnote. I learned that habit at Balewadi in 2026, calling a behind-closed-doors state exhibition where every announced number had to be re-checked against what was actually happening on the mat.

The leadership layer: three names, three uncertainties

The captaincy announcement is the only piece of information here that can be read from inside the sport. Surjeet Singh leads the men, Naveen Kumar deputies. Nidhi Sharma leads the women, Ritu deputies.

A pause is necessary, because name verification is a genuine problem in Indian kabaddi. Surjeet Singh is a very common name in this sport, borne by raiding profiles and defending profiles alike. Until it is clear which Surjeet Singh has been appointed, drawing any tactical conclusion from his game is premature. 'Ritu' is very likely a shortened form of a longer registered name — Ritu Negi, who has captained the Indian women's side in recent years, is the first match that comes to mind, but the identification remains incomplete without confirmation.

What can be said without confirmation is the structure. The men's vice-captaincy has gone to a raider. If that is the Naveen Kumar known as the Express, the message sharpens considerably: India is not treating this as a development exercise but sending a full-strength squad. And if it is not him, the hierarchy still points one way — this team is built around raiding output, the standard Indian template against weak tackling units.

This is where I have to restrain my own instincts. Assembling raid-success rates and Super 10 counts is the easiest work available, and at this tournament none of that data exists yet. No raid points, no tackle points, no successful raid percentage has been published. Any claim about squad strength in the launch coverage should be read as promotional rather than analytical. Captains, anthem, logo and mascot all arrived in a single curtain-raiser. That tells you where the event's centre of gravity sits: closer to brand-building than to competition.

The rules layer: the comfort India gets is the drama the tournament loses

An IKF-approved Standard Style ruleset means the Indian squad faces no adaptation friction. Same court, same 30 seconds, same bonus line, same do-or-die — everything they have played a thousand times in the league. That convenience looks neutral and is not. For countries whose kabaddi culture began recently, this ruleset is something to learn. For India it is like breathing. Standardisation does not narrow the gap; it widens it.

The bonus line will be the most exploited square metre of the fortnight. Against deep, passive defences it offers low-risk single points, and strong raiding units break weak tackling units exactly that way — through accumulation rather than difficulty. The margin on the scoreboard grows; the tension in the stands falls.

Do-or-Die cuts the other way. It strikes directly at the oldest survival tactic available to a weaker side: burning empty raids to run down the clock. For competitive fairness that is good. For a showcase event it is bad, because the room for an upset shrinks precisely where a weaker team loses its instrument for buying time. This tournament is structurally friendly to India, and for that very reason it will tell us more about the rest of the world than about India.

The schedule layer nobody counts

Sixty-two matches in nine days averages seven a day. That does not come out of a single court; multi-court operation has to be assumed. Multi-court means four or five cants echoing in one hall at once, and in that noise the rhythm of a raider's breathing becomes almost impossible to hear. My concern here is professional, because the one-page cant-rhythm chart I built in the empty stands at Balewadi in 2026 existed precisely so that the person behind the microphone would still know what was happening on the mat. In a multi-court hall that job doubles in difficulty.

And for the players? Many of these squads are amateur in structure, without sports-science support behind them. Seven matches a day across nine days, against Ahmedabad's humid late-October afternoons, raises soft-tissue injury exposure directly. Kabaddi carries this risk acutely because so much of the tackle load lands on knees, ankles and hips — the joints that answer for it on day three if they did not recover on day two.

Contrarian: if dominance is the best argument, the argument is weak

Here is the turn where I have to distrust my own pleasure. This is a home showcase, and naturally we want the scoreboard to tilt our way. But if the purpose of the tournament is the 2030 file, winning by large margins is the weakest page in it. Nobody on a programme committee asks how strong the host is. They ask how open the contest is.

Which raises the sharpest question of the week, and nobody on the podium asked it. The list of thirteen countries was not published. The Jakarta 2026 file is still open on my shelf — on that night of 18-27 I watched every Iran tackle twice, and ever since I have named Iran as co-favourite in every preview. But Iran and South Korea are not Commonwealth nations. Unless both have been invited as special entrants, this tournament in Ahmedabad is structurally incapable of answering the question Jakarta left behind. The Commonwealth frame excludes kabaddi's two strongest challengers. That is not the sport's fault; it is the frame's limit — but a file that does not say so is not an honest file.

The second inverted angle concerns the shape of the launch itself. Captains, anthem, logo and mascot all landed in one evening, while group compositions, squad lists and performance data remain unpublished. That sequence is itself a statement. When identity arrives before information, the centre of gravity is not on the mat but at the brand table. I have no complaint about that — kabaddi needs a brand, and the entire league project since 2026 rests on that logic. The complaint is that when publicity runs ahead, reporting runs behind, and the numbers arrive so late that they only make records rather than understanding.

The third inverted angle is about careers and opportunity, and it is the least discussed subject attached to this tournament. Women's kabaddi has four Asian Games golds and not a single franchise league. The men have a glittering league that turns a railway clerk into a crore-rupee auction lot every year. That asymmetry is the central irony of this sport, and Ahmedabad neither washes it away nor deepens it — it simply displays it once more. If a 2030 file is genuinely being built, its first page should be the women's draw, because gender balance is exactly where this sport is simultaneously strongest and most neglected.

An old conversation comes back here. In the Sportstar podcast conversation with Manpreet Singh, the most useful thing that emerged was not a discipline tip but a structural observation — that Indian kabaddi's entire career machinery is built around domestic performance, with the international calendar arriving afterwards. That order should have been reversed. Ahmedabad gives us one glimpse of the reversed order, in the hope that nine days produce something other than a photo opportunity.

Two columns, the ones I keep for every match — what happened on the left, what I felt happening on the right. At that launch the left column was blank. The captains had spoken, the symbols had been shown, but the points table, the groups and the form were all still to come. That blankness is ordinary in sports journalism and the remedy is simple: wait, and when the numbers arrive, apply them to yourself first.

Takeaway: watch three things over the next nine days, forget the fourth

When the first cant rings out on 23 October, the scoreboard will be the least interesting object in the hall. The first thing to watch is the composition of the women's groups — how many teams, which teams, and whether three countries really did stay away. The second is the raid-dependence of the international squads. A team that leans on the bonus line merely to survive gets squeezed by a strong tackling unit after the semifinal, and that difference becomes visible from day three. The third is India's rotation. If the captain sits out group games and returns for the semifinal, this is being treated as workload management, which is good news.

The fourth thing to forget is the size of the trophy. Even if India lifts it on 31 October, that adds not one page to the 2030 file. The weight in that file belongs elsewhere — to how many of the thirteen countries brought a women's team, and how many gave this event a real place in their calendar. An autopsy is a second look, not a verdict. On the evening of 31 October I will not be watching the trophy. I will be opening the women's final scorecard to see how many players in it were chanting an international cant for the first time. That number will decide whether Ahmedabad moved kabaddi closer to 2030 or simply produced another good photograph.