Will fifth time be the charm for Hong Kong?

Hong Kong are among the three teams that qualified for the Asia Cup 2025 through the 2024 ACC Men's Premier Cup.

Hong Kong beat Qatar and Malaysia to finish second in their group to reach the semi-finals in the competition. They went down to Oman in the semi-finals, but trumped a higher-ranked Nepal side in the third-place playoff match to qualify for the Asia Cup.

This is the fifth time that Hong Kong have qualified for the Asia Cup, and the second in the T20I format.

They qualified for the first time in 2004, and then again in 2008 before missing out on the next four editions. After a ten-year wait, they again made it in 2018 and 2022. However, they are still searching for their maiden win in the tournament, and have not progressed beyond the first round in any of their previous appearances.

Hong Kong have been busy in the build-up to the Asia Cup. In March, they played a tri-series in Malaysia and reached the final, where they went down to Bahrain. In the group stages, they beat Malaysia twice and lost one game to Bahrain, and won the other match against them in a Super Over, after a tie in regulation time.

A quadrangular series at home followed in April, but had a disappointing campaign there. They lost their first game to Kuwait before beating Qatar. Their match against Nepal was rained out, and they failed to reach the final. They finished third after beating Qatar in the play-off.

After a break, they were back in action in the Asia-Pacific Cricket Champions Trophy. They registered back-to-back wins over Samoa and hosts Singapore, sandwiched between two defeats to Malaysia. They beat Samoa and Singapore again, but suffered a third defeat in the tournament to Malaysia in the rain-hit final.

Hong Kong will be led by spin-bowling allrounder Yasim Murtaza, who took over as captain only this year. He has picked up 70 wickets from 63 T20Is with his left-arm spin at an impressive economy rate of 6.33.

Offspinner Ehsan Khan will be the bowler to look out for. He is their leading T20I wicket-taker with 127 scalps from 94 games at an economy of 6.26 and a bowling average of 16.45.

With the bat, Hong Kong will look at Nizakat Khan, Babar Hayat, Anshy Rath and Zeeshan Ali to do the heavy-lifting. The four of them have recently been shuffled in the top four of their batting order, and are the only four Hong Kong batters with more than 1000 T20I runs.

Among them, Zeeshan could be the biggest aggressor, boasting a strike rate of 141.96 - comfortably the best among any of their batters with more than 100 runs.

Hong Kong have been placed in Group B. They play the tournament opener against Afghanistan in Abu Dhabi on September 9 and then take on Bangladesh after a day's break on September 11. They then move to Dubai, where they play Sri Lanka on September 15.

Yasim Murtaza (capt), Babar Hayat, Zeeshan Ali, Niazakat Khan, Nasrulla Rana, Martin Coetzee, Anshy Rath, Kalhan Challu, Ayush Shukla, Aizaz Khan, Ateeq Iqbal, Kinchit Shah, Ali Hassan, Shahid Wasif, Mohammad Ghazanfar, Mohammad Waheed, Ehsan Khan