India Refuses Women's Asia Cup Trophy From Pakistan's Mohsin Naqvi After Beating Sri Lanka

India's women's cricket team beat Sri Lanka by 72 runs in Dubai on Sunday to win a record-extending eighth Asia Cup title. They still don't have the trophy.

Harmanpreet Kaur's team refused to accept it from Asian Cricket Council president Mohsin Naqvi, who is also chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board and Pakistan's interior minister, according to multiple outlets covering the match at Dubai International Cricket Stadium.

The presentation ceremony, which normally starts within 20 minutes of a match ending, was delayed by roughly 50 minutes, according to Hindustan Times and Al Jazeera. Match officials got their mementos. Sri Lanka captain Chamari Athapaththu and her team collected their runners-up medals and cheque from Naqvi. India never came out of the dressing room.

BCCI says it offered alternatives, Naqvi said no

India Today reported that BCCI secretary Devajit Saikia said the board had told organizers from the start it would not accept the trophy from Naqvi, but tried to find a workaround. The BCCI offered to let ACC deputy chair Khalid Al Zarooni hand over the trophy instead, Saikia said. Naqvi turned that down.

BCCI then proposed following what it called "recent norm" — letting a representative of the winning cricket board present the trophy to its own team. Naqvi rejected that too, according to Saikia's account to India Today. Neither side moved, and the ceremony ended without India collecting the trophy or its winners' medals.

India's coach, Amol Muzumdar, confirmed the decision came from the top. "That stand has been taken by BCCI, and we stand by it," he told reporters, per Al Jazeera and India Today. "The tournament is over. We are the champions, and that's good enough."

Not the first time

This is the second straight year the Naqvi trophy standoff has played out in Dubai. India's men's team refused to accept the 2025 Asia Cup trophy from Naqvi after beating Pakistan by five wickets in the final, and Hindustan Times reports that trophy is still sitting, uncollected, in the ACC's Dubai office. The Dawn Tribune also noted that India's under-19 team separately declined to receive medals from Naqvi after finishing runners-up in a Dubai tournament, with an Afghanistan Cricket Board official stepping in to present them instead.

Broader India-Pakistan friction has bled into cricket repeatedly over the past two years, including the no-handshake dispute during the 2025 men's Asia Cup, which was played in the shadow of the Pahalgam terror attack and India's subsequent military response, Operation Sindoor, according to Hindustan Times.

Pakistan pushes back

Coverage split on how to frame the standoff. The Dawn Tribune quoted ACC sources in Dubai saying the trophy presentation protocol "had been agreed in advance" and that the trophy was available, placing the decision to skip it squarely on India. That same outlet carried a statement from Pakistan's Minister of State for Interior, Talal Chaudhry, who said: "India is unable to digest its defeat on the military and diplomatic front and has dragged politics into sports."

From Pakistan's side, Naqvi holds his ACC role independent of Indian politics, and a sporting body's ceremonial protocol shouldn't hinge on a bilateral dispute between two governments. Indian outlets, including India Today and Hindustan Times, don't rebut that argument directly. They instead document that BCCI proposed two separate compromises, both of which Naqvi rejected, which complicates a narrative that India alone refused to negotiate.

The Indian coverage does establish, and what Dawn Tribune's framing leaves out, is that BCCI made concrete offers to route the trophy through a neutral or Indian official rather than simply boycotting the ceremony outright. Whether that counts as a good-faith attempt at compromise or a pretext depends on which side you ask, and neither the ACC nor the BCCI has released a joint account reconciling the two positions.

On the field, India's win was lopsided. Shafali Verma scored 68 off 39 balls and Smriti Mandhana added 59 off 39 as India set Sri Lanka a target that proved out of reach; Sree Charani took four wickets and Deepti Sharma three as Sri Lanka were bowled out for 111, according to Outlook India.

What happens to the physical trophy now is unclear. Muzumdar told reporters after the match he didn't know if or when the team would ever receive it. The BCCI has said it intends to raise the matter with the International Cricket Council, per Outlook India, but as of Sunday night no formal complaint or ICC response had been reported.