Arshdeep Singh vs Jasprit Bumrah Stats: Test, ODI, T20I & IPL

Arshdeep Singh has taken more Twenty20 international wickets than Jasprit Bumrah. That is the one line in this comparison most people do not expect: 127 to 121, from fewer matches, at an average of 19.70 against Bumrah's 18.08. Arshdeep is India's leading wicket-taker in the format, the first India bowler to reach 100 T20I wickets, and he got there in his sixty-fourth match — faster than any pace bowler from any country.

Set against that, Bumrah concedes 6.51 runs an over in T20Is and Arshdeep about 8.5. Two runs an over across four overs is eight runs a match, which in a format decided by single figures is a larger difference than the wicket columns suggest. And once you leave the twenty-over game the comparison stops being a comparison at all: Bumrah has 234 Test wickets and Arshdeep has never played a Test.

So this is a page about one format with a long footnote. The T20I argument is genuine and close. Everything outside it belongs to Bumrah by default, and the honest thing is to say so rather than pad the other columns.

Where the two records overlap

Format	Arshdeep Singh	Jasprit Bumrah
T20Is	84 matches, 127 wickets at 19.70, best 5/51	95 matches, 121 wickets at 18.08, best 4/15
T20I economy	about 8.5	6.51
ODIs	15 matches, 25 wickets at 24.44, best 5/37	91 matches, 151 wickets at 23.74, best 6/19
Tests	none	52 matches, 234 wickets at 19.79, 16 five-fors
First-class	22 matches, 67 wickets at 30.68	80 matches, 326 wickets at 21.45
List A	45 matches, 78 wickets at 23.84	not a comparable sample
IPL	95 matches, 111 wickets, economy 9.19, best 5/32	158 matches, 187 wickets, economy 7.34, best 5/10

Arshdeep's international figures follow his career record to 21 March 2026 and Bumrah's to 4 August 2026, which is why the T20I totals should be read as a snapshot rather than a finished ranking. Both IPL rows are counted from ball-by-ball data through the 2026 final.

The T20I argument, taken seriously

Two bowlers, almost the same average, two runs an over apart. That combination tells you exactly how each one takes his wickets.

Arshdeep bowls to take them. He is a left-armer with a genuine yorker and a wide slower ball, and he is given the overs where the batter has to hit: the last four, the eighteenth and twentieth in particular. A bowler in that role gets wickets because batters are swinging, and gets hit because batters are swinging. An economy of 8.5 in the death overs of modern T20 is respectable; the same economy across a whole innings would not be.

Bumrah is used the same way and does not concede. His 6.51 across 95 matches is the outlier statistic in either career, and its most extreme expression is the 2024 T20 World Cup, where he was named player of the tournament with 15 wickets at an average of 8.26 and an economy of 4.17. In the same tournament Arshdeep finished as joint-leading wicket-taker with 17 — more wickets, at a much higher cost, in the same conditions on the same days.

That single tournament is the comparison in miniature, and it also shows why India played both. One of them ends innings; the other one stops them scoring while he does it.

There is a detail in the best-figures column worth pausing on. Arshdeep's 5 for 51 is a five-wicket haul that cost more than twelve runs an over, and Bumrah's 4 for 15 cost under four. Both are career-best returns. A bowler whose best day involves conceding 51 runs is a bowler being used at the very end of innings, in overs where a wicket and a boundary often arrive off consecutive balls, and that is a description of Arshdeep's job rather than a criticism of how he does it.

The wicket count and how to read it

Arshdeep's 127 is a real achievement and it is not an artefact of playing more games — he reached it in 84 matches to Bumrah's 95, and it includes a five-wicket haul, which Bumrah has never taken in the format.

But the wicket count also reflects opportunity. Bumrah has missed large blocks of T20I cricket to injury and to rest, and has often been unavailable for the bilateral series between tournaments where a specialist accumulates wickets in bulk. Arshdeep has played almost every T20I India has contested since 2022, including the series most senior players sit out. He has taken his chances in them, which is to his credit, but the totals are not drawn from the same pool of fixtures.

He was named ICC Men's T20I Cricketer of the Year for 2024, the first bowler ever to win that award, which is a fair summary of how much of India's twenty-over bowling he was carrying by then.

The 2026 final, and the trap in comparing finals

Both were in the side that won the T20 World Cup at the Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad on 8 March 2026, when India made 255 for 5 and bowled New Zealand out for 159 to win by 96 runs. Bumrah took 4 for 15, which is his best return in the format and came in the biggest match he has played in it.

It is tempting to treat that as the settling of the argument, and it should not be. A 96-run win is the one match situation in which a death bowler's economy is meaningless and a strike bowler's wickets are cheap: New Zealand had to attack from the tenth over onwards and Bumrah was bowling at batters with no option. Arshdeep's four overs in the same innings were bowled in the same conditions to the same instruction.

What the final does show is which of them India trusts with the decisive overs of a knockout, and that answer has been consistent since 2022. Arshdeep bowls more overs across a year; Bumrah bowls the ones the selectors care most about.

India's left-arm problem

Part of Arshdeep's value has nothing to do with either column above. India has produced very few left-arm seam bowlers of international standard — Zaheer Khan and Irfan Pathan were the last two to hold a place across formats — and the angle a left-armer creates against a right-handed top order is not replaceable by picking a better right-armer.

That is why Arshdeep has been picked in series where Bumrah was available and fit, rather than only as cover for him. A T20 attack containing both gives a captain a right-arm bowler who can bowl six different balls and a left-armer who takes the ball across the right-hander and into the left-hander, and neither of them cancels the other. The fast bowling evolution guide traces how thin that particular seam has been for India.

One-day cricket: fifteen matches against ninety-one

There is almost nothing to compare. Arshdeep has 25 ODI wickets from 15 matches at 24.44, with a five-for, which is a good return from a small sample and no more than that. Bumrah has 151 at 23.74 across 91 matches and has bowled in World Cups and Champions Trophy knockouts.

Arshdeep's List A record — 78 wickets at 23.84 in 45 matches — suggests the fifty-over game suits him better than his tiny international sample shows, and it is the strongest argument for giving him more of it. The Vijay Hazare Trophy guide covers the competition most of those matches were played in.

No Test career, and what that costs the comparison

Twenty-two first-class matches and 67 wickets at 30.68 is not a Test case, and Arshdeep has never been picked in a Test squad on merit. That is not unusual for a modern white-ball specialist, but it is the reason any all-format comparison here collapses.

Bumrah's Test record — 234 wickets at 19.79, sixteen five-wicket hauls, the best career average of any bowler with 200 or more Test wickets — is the whole of his claim to be the best bowler India has produced. Nothing in Arshdeep's record engages with it. The most Test wickets for India list is a one-sided page as far as these two are concerned.

In the IPL the gap widens

Franchise cricket gives the cleanest like-for-like sample, four overs each, and here Bumrah is well clear: 187 wickets at an economy of 7.34 against 111 at 9.19. The strike rates run the other way — Arshdeep takes a wicket every 18.3 balls against Bumrah's 19.4 — which is the same pattern as the T20I record, more aggressively expressed.

Arshdeep has played his entire IPL career for Punjab Kings, where he has generally bowled the powerplay and the death with a weaker attack around him, and his 5 for 32 is the best figures by a Punjab seamer in some years. Bumrah's have all come at Mumbai Indians with a settled bowling group. The IPL best economy rate leaderboard shows how unusual Bumrah's figure is across eighteen seasons.

The verdict

• T20I wickets, and the speed of reaching 100: Arshdeep.
• T20I average, economy and tournament impact: Bumrah.
• Five-wicket hauls in T20Is: Arshdeep, one to none.
• ODI record: Bumrah, on volume and on evidence.
• Test cricket: Bumrah, uncontested.
• IPL wickets and economy: Bumrah.
• IPL strike rate: Arshdeep.
• Best bowler India can pick for a single T20 over: Bumrah, and no serious selector disagrees.

The useful conclusion is not a ranking. It is that Arshdeep has become good enough at one specific job — left-arm, at the death, every game — that he has out-accumulated the best bowler in the world in the format they share, and that this says as much about how the two have been used as about how good they are. The Arshdeep Singh and Jasprit Bumrah pages carry each career, the player directory holds the rest of the attack, the cricket in India hub covers the surrounding story, and the T20 international history guide explains how the format's bowling economics changed under both of them.

Sources and method

The two international records here are quoted from published career figures with different revision dates — Arshdeep's to 21 March 2026, Bumrah's to 4 August 2026 — and both men were active. In a format where a bowler can play six matches in a fortnight, that matters: the 127-to-121 gap is a reading taken at a moment, not a permanent standing.

Arshdeep's T20I economy is given as an approximation because published figures for it vary slightly with how wides and no-balls are counted, and rounding it to one decimal place would imply a precision the sources do not agree on. Bumrah's 6.51 and both averages are quoted as published. The 2024 T20 World Cup figures — Bumrah's 15 wickets at 8.26 and an economy of 4.17, Arshdeep's 17 as joint-leading wicket-taker — come from the tournament's own records.

That Arshdeep was the first India bowler to 100 T20I wickets, reaching it in his sixty-fourth match, follows ESPNcricinfo's reporting when he passed the mark at the Asia Cup in September 2025. The ICC award for 2024 is a matter of record.

IPL figures are computed here rather than quoted, from ball-by-ball data covering all 1,243 matches of the competition between 2008 and the 2026 final, with a wicket credited to the bowler only for the six modes of dismissal that credit him. Run-outs are excluded, so these counts can differ by one or two from lists that treat every fall of a wicket as a bowler's wicket.

The judgement that opportunity explains part of the T20I wicket gap is an inference from which fixtures each man was picked for. It is not derived from a model, and no attempt is made here to adjust either bowler's figures for the phase of the innings he bowled in.