Cambodia’s men will not bowl a ball at this week’s ACC Men’s Challenger Cup in Singapore after three squad members were turned back at Changi airport and a fourth picked up an untimely injury, leaving the side unable to raise the minimum XI.
Tournament officials confirmed the forfeiture on Friday morning, awarding walk-overs to Indonesia and Uzbekistan, the two other sides in Group B. Both now progress automatically to the quarter-finals.
No official reason has been offered for the visa refusals. Repeated calls and e-mails to the Cricket Association of Cambodia (CAC) have drawn silence, while Singapore’s immigration authorities do not comment on individual cases. What is clear is that the late disruption wrecked any realistic chance of drafting replacements before the first fixture.
Cambodia only joined the ICC as an Associate in 2022 and played their maiden T20I last year at the South-East Asian Games in Phnom Penh. That squad was built around a core of naturalised cricketers from India and Pakistan, 13 in all, each handed a Cambodian passport days before the opening ceremony. Skipper Luqman Butt, for instance, had spent most of his domestic career in Pakistan prior to the move.
The hosts swept the board at those Games, taking gold in T10, T20 and 50-over formats. Their rapid rise, though, drew pointed remarks from beaten opponents. After the T20 final Malaysia questioned the eligibility timeline, noting in The Straits Times: “We noted that the passports were issued on April 23 this year, and the first match was played six days later, whereas the deadline for the shortlist was March 3 … This begs the question, can amendments be made for as many as 13 players? If so, what is the purpose of a shortlist that was submitted beforehand?”
This week’s Challenger Cup format meant the round-robin stage was always going to jettison just one side: ten entrants, eight quarter-final slots. Two groups contained only two teams, both assured of progression regardless of results. Cambodia’s withdrawal effectively turned Group B into another of those, trimming the competitive portion further. Elsewhere, Singapore and Maldives edged Myanmar to move on from the only remaining three-team group.
It is a disappointing hiatus for a nation that had hoped to use this tournament to prove its SEA Games success was no one-off. A CAC official, speaking informally earlier in the year, said the board’s priority for 2026 was “regular, proper international cricket”. That ambition will have to wait a little longer.
