Asia Cup in the UAE: Sharjah 1984 to Dubai 2025

The Asia Cup did not come to the United Arab Emirates. It started there. The first edition, in April 1984, was played entirely at Sharjah, a ground built in the desert by a businessman who loved cricket, in a country that would not play an official one-day international of its own for another decade. Every argument about whether the Emirates is a "real" cricket country runs into this awkward fact: continental cricket's flagship tournament is a UAE invention before it is anything else.

Five editions have now been staged in the Emirates — 1984, 1995, 2018, 2022 and 2025 — and the reasons have shifted with each one. The first two belonged to the golden age of Sharjah as a commercial one-day venue. The last three happened because somebody else could not, or would not, host: India declined to receive Pakistan in 2018, Sri Lanka's economy collapsed in 2022, and by 2025 the UAE had simply become the pragmatic answer to the question of where India and Pakistan can share a ground.

This page covers the five UAE-hosted tournaments in turn. The Asia Cup editions played elsewhere, and the finals record of the teams themselves, sit outside its scope — for one national angle on those, see the history of Bangladesh's Asia Cup finals.

1984: three teams and a new idea

The Asian Cricket Conference — later the Asian Cricket Council — had been formed only the year before, in 1983, as a bloc to give the subcontinent a collective voice in a game still run largely from London. A continental tournament was the obvious way to give the new body something to organise, and Sharjah, with its purpose-built stadium and its promoter Abdul Rahman Bukhatir already staging exhibition matches for expatriate crowds, was the obvious place to hold it.

The tournament itself was tiny. Three teams — India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka — played a single round-robin of one-day internationals across a week in April 1984, with no final. Under sponsorship it went by the name Rothmans Asia Cup. India, led by Sunil Gavaskar, won both their matches and took the title; wicketkeeper Surinder Khanna was named player of the tournament. Sri Lanka finished as runners-up, and Pakistan went home without a win.

It reads like a footnote now, but two things about that week mattered. It established Sharjah as a venue where official international cricket, not just festival matches, could be played. And it created a property the ACC has run ever since — a tournament that has outlived every sponsor, format change and political crisis thrown at it. The fuller story of the ground itself is told in the guide to Sharjah Cricket Stadium's history.

1995: the Sharjah era's second act

The competition returned to the Emirates in April 1995 for its fifth edition, again at Sharjah, this time as the Pepsi Asia Cup and this time with four teams, Bangladesh having joined the original three. The 1993 edition had been abandoned altogether because relations between India and Pakistan made it impossible to stage — a preview, as it turned out, of the politics that would dominate the tournament's later life.

The 1995 group stage produced a three-way tie: India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka all finished level on points, and net run rate sent India and Sri Lanka through to the final. India won it comfortably, chasing down Sri Lanka's 230 with eight wickets and more than eight overs to spare. Mohammad Azharuddin's unbeaten 90 took the match award, Navjot Sidhu was player of the tournament, and India collected a fourth Asia Cup title.

By then Sharjah was staging one-day tournaments almost continuously, and the Asia Cup was in some ways just the most official of them. That wider phenomenon — the Cricketers Benefit Fund Series, the April and October tournaments, the packed expatriate stands — is covered in the history of the UAE as a neutral venue.

The long gap

After 1995 the Asia Cup stayed away from the Gulf for twenty-three years. Editions rotated around Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan and India, and the UAE's international cricket went through its own cycles: the decline of Sharjah's one-day circuit in the early 2000s, the construction of new international grounds in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, and, from 2009 onwards, Pakistan's decade of playing its home fixtures in the Emirates. By the mid-2010s the country had three international stadiums, an experienced host board and a resident ICC headquarters — everything required to absorb a major tournament at short notice.

That capacity, rather than any plan, is what brought the Asia Cup back.

2018: the tournament India would not stage

India held the hosting rights for the 2018 edition, the fourteenth. But India had suspended bilateral cricket with Pakistan since the 2008 Mumbai attacks, and the government would not have Pakistan tour. Rather than stage an Asia Cup without one of its two biggest draws, the ACC moved the entire event to the UAE in April 2018, with the BCCI remaining the official host. It was the first Asia Cup in the Emirates in a generation, played in September across Dubai and Abu Dhabi with six teams: the five Full Member sides plus Hong Kong, who came through a qualifier.

The cricket was better than the schedule, which forced sides into back-to-back games in serious heat. The Super Four stage produced one genuine rarity — a tie between India and Afghanistan in Dubai — and the final on 28 September was the closest in the tournament's history to that point. Liton Das made 121, his maiden one-day international hundred, before being stumped by MS Dhoni off Kuldeep Yadav, and Bangladesh were bowled out for 222. India stumbled in the chase, lost seven wickets, and still got home off the very last ball of the fiftieth over for a seventh title.

For the Emirates the significance was structural. The 2018 tournament demonstrated that Dubai and Abu Dhabi could stage a multi-nation event featuring an India-Pakistan fixture, at six weeks' notice, without incident. Every subsequent relocation decision has leaned on that precedent.

2022: Sri Lanka's title in exile

The 2022 edition belonged to Sri Lanka twice over — it was theirs to host, and theirs to win — yet not a ball was bowled on the island. Sri Lanka's economic collapse that year, with fuel shortages and political unrest at their height, made staging a tournament impossible, and the event moved to Dubai and Sharjah while Sri Lanka Cricket kept its hosting designation.

It was also the first Asia Cup played as a Twenty20 tournament, the format switching to match the T20 World Cup that followed a month later in Australia — a scheduling logic the tournament has used since, sizing itself to whichever World Cup comes next. Sharjah's return to the rota gave the old ground its first Asia Cup matches since 1995.

Sri Lanka lost their opening game to Afghanistan and then won everything else. In the final in Dubai they collapsed to 58 for 5 against Pakistan's fast bowlers, were rescued by Bhanuka Rajapaksa's unbeaten 71, and posted 170 for 6. Wanindu Hasaranga and Pramod Madushan then shared seven wickets as Pakistan were bowled out for 147, a 23-run win and a sixth title for Sri Lanka — earned in a country other than their own, in front of a crowd that adopted them.

2025: hosts on the field, and a trophy nobody lifted

By 2025 the arrangement had hardened into routine. India held the hosting rights; India and Pakistan could still not meet on Indian soil; so the tournament was staged in the UAE, at the Dubai International Stadium and the Sheikh Zayed Stadium in Abu Dhabi, from 9 to 28 September. Eight teams played nineteen T20 matches, and for the first time the UAE's own side took part in an Asia Cup on home ground, drawn in a group with India, Pakistan and Oman. The national team's longer road to occasions like this is traced in the UAE national team history.

On the field, India were the best side in the tournament and beat Pakistan three times, including by five wickets in the final in Dubai for a record ninth title. Off the field, it was the most rancorous Asia Cup ever played. Following that year's Pahalgam attack and the military exchanges that followed, India's players declined to shake hands with their Pakistani counterparts, beginning with the group match on 14 September — a decision the ACC president and Pakistan Cricket Board chairman Mohsin Naqvi publicly condemned. After the final, India refused to accept the trophy from Naqvi; the presentation was delayed for over an hour, the trophy was withdrawn, and the champions celebrated without it. The dispute over its handover ran on well beyond the tournament, into meetings between the boards.

It was a strange coda to the UAE's five decades with the competition: the country had provided the one patch of neutral ground on which the fixture could exist at all, and the fixture had still very nearly come apart. The background to that rivalry is set out in the guide to the India-Pakistan cricket relationship.

The five editions side by side

Edition	Year	Format	Venues	Winner	Beaten finalist
1st	1984	ODI, round robin	Sharjah	India	Sri Lanka (runners-up, no final)
5th	1995	ODI	Sharjah	India	Sri Lanka
14th	2018	ODI	Dubai, Abu Dhabi	India	Bangladesh
15th	2022	T20	Dubai, Sharjah	Sri Lanka	Pakistan
17th	2025	T20	Dubai, Abu Dhabi	India	Pakistan

India have won four of the five UAE-staged editions, which says as much about India's white-ball depth across four decades as it does about conditions. Sharjah has staged Asia Cup cricket in three different decades, thirty-eight years apart at the extremes, which no other ground in the tournament's rotation can claim.

Why it keeps coming back

The pattern in the last three editions is not really about cricket. The Asia Cup returns to the Emirates whenever the politics of the subcontinent make the designated host unusable, because the UAE offers a combination nowhere else in the region can: three international grounds within a two-hour drive, a September climate that is brutal but workable under lights, direct flights from every participating country, large resident populations from all of them to fill the stands, and a host board — whose workings are described in the guide to the Emirates Cricket Board structure — that is politically acceptable to everyone because it threatens no one.

There are real costs. September heat in Dubai is punishing for players, afternoon games are close to unplayable, and an Asia Cup in the Emirates is always a television event first and a live spectacle second, with sparse crowds for anything that is not India or Pakistan. But no other neutral option has the infrastructure, and none has the track record. Whether by design or default, the tournament that began in Sharjah in 1984 has ended up treating the Emirates as home — which, on the historical record, is exactly what it is. The rest of the country's cricket story is on the cricket in the UAE hub.

Sources and method

This page draws on Asian Cricket Council tournament records, contemporary reporting of the 1984, 1995, 2018, 2022 and 2025 editions in the Gulf and subcontinental press, and match records verified against established cricket databases. Details of the 2018 and 2022 relocations follow the boards' own announcements at the time; the account of the 2025 trophy dispute follows contemporaneous news reporting rather than any single official statement, since the parties disagreed publicly. Title counts and edition numbers are stated as of the 2025 tournament. The page is descriptive throughout; no computed statistics are claimed.