India vs UAE ODI Head-to-Head: Record & Results

India and the United Arab Emirates have met three times in one-day internationals: at Sharjah in April 1994, at Dambulla in July 2004 and at Perth in February 2015. India won all three, by 71 runs, 116 runs and nine wickets.

None was a bilateral fixture. The first was a group match in the Austral-Asia Cup, a tournament staged in Sharjah for six sides. The second came when the Asia Cup admitted Associate nations for the first time. The third was a World Cup pool match. A gap of a decade separates each meeting from the next, which is unusual for two boards whose cricket is otherwise closely entwined — the UAE has hosted more Indian cricket than any country outside India, and none of it has been against the UAE national side.

That last point is the paradox of the fixture. Sharjah staged dozens of India matches in the 1980s and 1990s; Dubai and Abu Dhabi have since hosted the Indian Premier League twice over, Asia Cups, and India's neutral-venue commitments. The UAE side has watched most of it from the outside.

All three matches

Date	Ground	Tournament	Result
13 Apr 1994	Sharjah Cricket Stadium	Austral-Asia Cup	India 273/5; UAE 202/9. India by 71 runs
16 Jul 2004	Dambulla	Asia Cup	India 260/6; UAE 144 (35.0). India by 116 runs
28 Feb 2015	WACA Ground, Perth	World Cup, Pool B	UAE 102 (31.3); India 104/1 (18.5). India by 9 wickets

Sharjah, 13 April 1994

The fixture opened at the ground the UAE could reasonably call home, in a six-team tournament that also involved Pakistan, Australia, New Zealand and Sri Lanka. India made 273 for 5, with Vinod Kambli unbeaten on 82 from 66 balls and half-centuries beside him, and the UAE replied with 202 for 9.

Mazhar Hussain made 70 from 112 balls, which remains the highest individual score anyone has made for the UAE against India. Bhupinder Singh took three wickets for 34 from his ten overs. The margin of 71 runs is the closest the UAE have come in the three matches, and it is worth noting that they batted the full fifty overs, which they did not manage in either of the two that followed.

India lost the final of that tournament to Pakistan by 39 runs. The Sharjah era, and what it meant for Indian cricket's relationship with the Gulf, is part of the wider story on the cricket in India hub.

Dambulla, 16 July 2004

Ten years later the two met again, in the first Asia Cup to include Associate members. The UAE and Hong Kong were both admitted for the 2004 edition, which expanded the tournament from four sides to six and gave the UAE their first Asia Cup match against India.

India made 260 for 6 at the Rangiri Dambulla International Stadium, Rahul Dravid making 104 from 93 balls and taking the award. The UAE were bowled out for 144 in 35 overs, Irfan Pathan taking three for 28 from eight overs, and the margin was 116 runs.

Mohammad Tauqir made 55 in that innings, one of only two half-centuries the UAE have made against India in the format. Tauqir would still be playing international cricket for the UAE eleven years later, and captained the side at the 2015 World Cup.

Perth, 28 February 2015

The most recent meeting, and the most one-sided. The UAE won the toss, batted, and were bowled out for 102 in 31.3 overs at the WACA. Ravichandran Ashwin took four for 25 and was named player of the match; Umesh Yadav and Ravindra Jadeja took two apiece.

Shaiman Anwar made 35 from 49 balls and was the only UAE batter to pass twenty. India reached 104 for 1 in 18.5 overs with Rohit Sharma making 57, and the nine-wicket margin was completed with more than thirty overs unused.

It was India's third win from three in that pool and part of a run in which they bowled out every side they played in the tournament before losing the semi-final to Australia. For the UAE, appearing at their first World Cup since 1996, it was the fourth of six defeats; they came closest against Zimbabwe and Ireland rather than against the Full Members. India's fifty-over history in more depth is on the India ODI history guide.

The Sharjah problem

The 1994 match is the only one of the three played in the UAE, and it is the only one likely to be. That sounds absurd for a fixture involving a country that has staged Indian cricket almost continuously for forty years, and the explanation lies in how the Emirates came to matter to the game.

Sharjah's cricket grew out of the Gulf's Indian and Pakistani expatriate population, and the tournaments staged there from 1984 onwards existed to put India and Pakistan in front of that audience. The UAE national side, when it formed, was drawn from broadly the same population — club cricketers, many of them South Asian by birth, playing in a domestic structure organised across the emirates by what is now the Emirates Cricket Board. Sharjah's commercial pull came from hosting other countries' rivalries, not from creating one of its own.

That has not changed with the shift to Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Both grounds are now among the busiest neutral venues in world cricket, and India's presence at them — Asia Cups, Champions Trophy matches, two relocated Indian Premier League seasons — has if anything increased. The UAE side benefits from the infrastructure and the coaching that presence funds, and almost never from the fixture list itself.

What the numbers say

Across the three matches the UAE have batted first twice and been dismissed inside their overs twice. India have lost ten wickets in total, six of them in the 1994 match.

Player	Side	Runs	Balls	Highest
Rohit Sharma	India	57	55	57
Shaiman Anwar	UAE	35	49	35
Virat Kohli	India	33	41	33

That table covers only the 2015 match, because the complete ball-by-ball record does not extend back to 1994 or 2004 for this fixture; Kambli's 82, Dravid's 104, Mazhar Hussain's 70 and Tauqir's 55 are all verified from those scorecards but cannot be combined into like-for-like aggregates. Rather than present a mixed table that reads as complete when it is not, the figures are given separately.

The one bowling figure worth isolating is Ashwin's four for 25 at Perth, the best return by either side in the fixture and the only four-wicket haul in it. Irfan Pathan's three for 28 at Dambulla is the next best.

Why the fixture stays this size

The UAE hold ODI status through the ICC's qualification pathway rather than as a Full Member, which means their fifty-over calendar is built around World Cup League 2 and the qualifying competitions beneath it, not around bilateral series with the Full Members. They earned their place in the 2023-27 League 2 cycle by finishing above Jersey and Papua New Guinea in a qualifier play-off in Namibia, and that competition — against Scotland, Oman, Namibia, Nepal, Canada, the United States and Papua New Guinea — is where the bulk of their ODIs are now played. India's fifty-over commitments run in the opposite direction, and the two calendars do not naturally intersect.

Where they do meet is at tournaments — and the UAE's route into those has narrowed rather than widened. They qualified for the 1996 and 2015 World Cups and have not since; they were in the 2004 Asia Cup and have appeared in the tournament only sporadically after it. The Twenty20 side has had the better of the two pathways, and the two Twenty20 internationals the sides have played, including a rout at Dubai in 2025, are covered on the India versus UAE T20I record page.

There is a further wrinkle specific to this pairing: when India play in the Emirates, they are almost always doing so at a neutral venue against a third team. Asia Cups in 2018 and 2025, the shifted IPL seasons of 2020 and 2021, and the Champions Trophy of 2025 all put India in Dubai or Abu Dhabi without putting them in front of the UAE. The India records this century sit on the most ODI runs for India leaderboard and the highest ODI team totals list, neither of which the UAE fixtures have contributed to.

Sources and method

The results table is drawn from the scorecards of the three matches. Innings totals, overs and margins for 1994 and 2004 are taken from those published scorecards; the 2015 match is additionally verified against its complete ball-by-ball record, which is where the individual figures for that game and Ashwin's four for 25 come from.

The batting table is explicitly restricted to the 2015 match and labelled as such, because combining it with partial figures from 1994 and 2004 would produce a leaderboard that looks like a fixture aggregate but is not one. Kambli's 82 not out, Dravid's 104, Mazhar Hussain's 70 and Mohammad Tauqir's 55 are individually verified and stated in the text rather than ranked in a table.

Tournament context — the six-team Austral-Asia Cup, the 2004 expansion of the Asia Cup to include Associates, the UAE's World Cup appearances — comes from the tournament records rather than being computed here. Complete to the end of August 2026; the sides have not met in a one-day international since 28 February 2015.