MS Dhoni vs Rishabh Pant Stats: Test, ODI, T20I & IPL

Rishabh Pant averages 43.50 in Test cricket with eight hundreds from 48 matches. MS Dhoni averaged 38.09 with six from 90. On the red-ball column, the successor is already ahead of the man he replaced, on both rate and hundreds, in barely half the matches — and the away record is more emphatic still.

Turn to white-ball cricket and the comparison inverts completely. Dhoni made 10,773 One-Day International runs at 50.57 and won India three global titles as captain. Pant has 871 ODI runs at 33.50 from 31 matches and 1,209 T20I runs at 23.25 from 76, and has never held a settled place in either format.

Behind both columns sits the thing neither record fully captures: Dhoni took 294 Test dismissals, 444 in ODIs and 91 in T20Is, and holds the record for international stumpings. Pant is a good keeper who has never been mistaken for a great one. This page follows the split format by format.

The records

Category	Dhoni	Pant
Tests	90 matches, 4,876 runs at 38.09, 6 hundreds, HS 224	48 matches, 3,662 runs at 43.50, 8 hundreds, HS 159 not out
ODIs	350 matches, 10,773 runs at 50.57, 10 hundreds	31 matches, 871 runs at 33.50, 1 hundred
T20Is	98 matches, 1,617 runs at 37.60, no hundred	76 matches, 1,209 runs at 23.25, no hundred
Test keeping	256 catches, 38 stumpings	158 catches, 15 stumpings
First-class	131 matches, 7,038 runs at 36.84	74 matches, 5,472 runs at 47.17, HS 308
IPL	278 matches, 5,439 runs at 38.30, five titles as captain	Past 3,800 runs; record ₹27 crore auction signing
Global titles as captain	Three	None

Dhoni's figures are final; he retired from international cricket in August 2020. Pant's are as of 8 November 2025 and all his rows are live.

Tests: the successor is ahead

Eight hundreds against six, and five runs of average, from 42 fewer matches. Whatever else is true, Pant is a better Test batter than Dhoni was, and the away record is where the difference is largest.

Dhoni's best Test innings was a 224 against Australia at Chennai in 2013, still the highest Test score by an Indian wicketkeeper, and his Test hundreds were made almost entirely at home. His overseas record was the weakest part of his career and the reason India's Test results abroad under his captaincy collapsed after 2011.

Pant's hundreds have come in the places Indian batters historically do not make them. He made 114 at the Oval in 2018, the first Test century by an Indian wicketkeeper in England; 159 not out at Sydney in January 2019, the first by an Indian keeper in Australia; and a hundred at Newlands in 2022. His 89 not out at the Gabba in January 2021 won India the Test and the series with the side's first-choice bowling attack absent.

The peak so far is the Headingley Test of June 2025, where he made 134 and 118. That made him the first India batter to score hundreds in both innings of a Test in England and only the second wicketkeeper in the game's history to make twin Test hundreds, after Andy Flower.

Keeping: not close, and worth stating plainly

Dhoni took 294 dismissals in Tests and 444 in ODIs, and his 195 international stumpings are more than any wicketkeeper has taken. He kept for fifteen years while captaining in most of those matches, which means setting fields and changing bowlers from behind the stumps, and his standard did not measurably decline.

Pant is a competent keeper with a lively pair of hands and a habit of conceding more than a specialist would. He has improved considerably since 2018 and he is not in the same conversation. India's line of keepers, and the standards each era applied, is set out in the page on India's great wicketkeepers.

If keeping is weighted as heavily as batting, that single section closes most of the gap Pant's Test batting opens. How heavily it should be weighted is the real argument, and there is no objective answer.

White-ball cricket: the reverse verdict

Dhoni's ODI record is the strongest any wicketkeeper has produced: 10,773 runs at 50.57, ten hundreds, and a 183 not out against Sri Lanka at Jaipur in 2005 that remains the highest ODI score by a keeper. He batted at five, six or seven and finished chases, and the average is a finisher's average built on a large number of not-outs.

Pant's ODI record — 871 runs at 33.50 from 31 matches, one hundred — is the least satisfying part of his career. He has been picked, dropped, recalled and left out again across seven years, partly because India's white-ball middle order has been crowded and partly because his own returns did not force the issue. The history of India's ODI side has few clearer cases of a batter whose red-ball record outran his one-day one.

In T20Is the numbers are worse: 1,209 runs at 23.25 from 76 matches, with no hundred and a place in the side that has never been secure. Dhoni's 37.60 in the format came from a finishing role at a time when 126 runs per hundred balls at the death was a competitive rate.

Then there is the trophy column. Dhoni captained India to the 2007 T20 World Cup, the 2011 World Cup and the 2013 Champions Trophy — the only complete set of ICC white-ball titles any captain has won. Pant has captained India in no format.

The IPL, and the price

Dhoni played 278 IPL matches, 248 of them for Chennai Super Kings, made 5,439 runs at 38.30 with no hundred, and captained the franchise to titles in 2010, 2011, 2018, 2021 and 2023. It is the most successful captaincy record the competition has produced alongside Rohit Sharma's.

Pant has passed 3,800 IPL runs for Delhi and then Lucknow Super Giants, and holds a different kind of record: at the 2025 mega auction he was bought for ₹27 crore, the largest fee ever paid for a player in the competition's history, and made captain. His highest IPL score is 128 not out, made for Delhi against Sunrisers Hyderabad in 2018. The mechanics that produced that ₹27 crore are described in the page on how the IPL auction works.

Published career figures for Pant's IPL totals differ between sources, which is why the number here is rounded.

The comeback, which has no counterpart

In December 2022 Pant was seriously injured in a car crash and missed fourteen months of cricket, including a home World Cup. He returned in the 2024 IPL, was back in the Test side within months, and produced the Headingley twin hundreds fifteen months after that.

Dhoni's career had no interruption of that kind. It is not a statistic and it belongs in any comparison of the two men, because roughly a fifth of Pant's likely peak was removed from the record and the record above does not show it.

Verdict

• Test average, Test hundreds and Test hundreds abroad: Pant, and this is the clearest thing on the page.
• Highest Test score: Dhoni's 224.
• Wicketkeeping: Dhoni, by a wide margin, on every countable measure.
• ODI runs, average, hundreds and finishing: Dhoni, overwhelmingly.
• T20I record: Dhoni.
• Global titles as captain: Dhoni, three to none.
• IPL runs and titles: Dhoni. IPL market value: Pant, at a record fee.
• First-class average and highest score: Pant, on 47.17 and a 308.

The two individual pages, for MS Dhoni and Rishabh Pant, carry each career in detail; the player directory has their contemporaries and the cricket in India hub the wider history.

Sources and method

Dhoni's international figures are final, dated 30 March 2025 in the statistical summary on his Wikipedia entry and cross-checked against ESPNcricinfo career records; his IPL totals run to the end of the 2026 season. Pant's international figures are as of 8 November 2025 from the same sources and every row is live.

The Headingley records — first India batter with hundreds in both innings of a Test in England, second wicketkeeper in Test history to make twin centuries — are as reported by ESPNcricinfo at the time. The ₹27 crore auction figure and its status as the highest fee in IPL history come from contemporaneous reporting of the 2025 mega auction. Pant's IPL career totals are given approximately because published figures differ materially between sources.

Wicketkeeping dismissal counts and the stumping record are as listed by ESPNcricinfo and ICC record pages. The judgement that Dhoni was the better keeper is a qualitative assessment supported by those counts rather than a measurement of technique, and the question of how heavily keeping should be weighted against batting is left open above because no objective weighting exists. Figures current as of 27 August 2026.