Rohit Sharma vs MS Dhoni Stats: Test, ODI, T20I & IPL

India has had two white-ball captains who won global tournaments, and this page compares them. MS Dhoni won three: the 2007 T20 World Cup, the 2011 World Cup and the 2013 Champions Trophy. Rohit Sharma has won two: the 2024 T20 World Cup and the 2025 Champions Trophy. Nobody else has one.

As batters the comparison is closer than almost anybody expects. Dhoni averaged 50.57 in One-Day Internationals; Rohit averages 48.95. Dhoni made 4,876 Test runs; Rohit made 4,301. Those figures come from opposite ends of the order — Dhoni was a wicketkeeper who batted five, six or seven and finished innings, Rohit an opener who built them — but the totals themselves sit within touching distance of each other.

Where they part company is at the extremes. Rohit holds the highest score in ODI history, the only three ODI double-centuries, and the record for sixes hit in international cricket. Dhoni holds a wicketkeeping record — 195 international stumpings, more than anybody — and the only complete set of ICC white-ball trophies any captain has won.

The two records

Category	Dhoni	Rohit
Tests	90 matches, 4,876 runs at 38.09, 6 hundreds	67 matches, 4,301 runs at 40.57, 12 hundreds
ODIs	350 matches, 10,773 runs at 50.57, 10 hundreds	288 matches, 11,895 runs at 48.95, 34 hundreds
T20Is	98 matches, 1,617 runs at 37.60, no hundred	159 matches, 4,231 runs at 32.05, 5 hundreds
Wicketkeeping	294 Test, 444 ODI and 91 T20I dismissals	None
IPL	278 matches, 5,439 runs at 38.30, five titles as captain	7,329 runs, six winner's medals, five as captain
Global titles as captain	Three	Two
Highest score	224 (Test), 183 not out (ODI)	212 (Test), 264 (ODI), 121 not out (T20I)

Dhoni's figures are final; he retired from international cricket in August 2020. Rohit's Test and T20I rows closed in 2025 and 2024 respectively, and his ODI row was still open in 2026.

ODI batting: the same average, opposite jobs

Fifty point five seven against 48.95 is as near a dead heat as two 300-match ODI careers can produce, and it hides two completely different records.

Dhoni's average was built on not-outs. A finisher who is unbeaten at the end of a successful chase does not lose his wicket, and across 350 matches that produced a very large number of undismissed innings, which is why he averaged 50 while making only ten hundreds. His 183 not out against Sri Lanka at Jaipur in 2005 is still the highest ODI score made by a wicketkeeper.

Rohit's was built on very large scores. Thirty-four hundreds from 288 matches — a conversion rate more than three times Dhoni's — and three double-hundreds, including 264 against Sri Lanka at Eden Gardens in 2014, which remains the highest individual innings in the format's history. At the 2019 World Cup he made five hundreds in a single tournament, which nobody else has done.

The useful way to read the two numbers is that Dhoni's average measures how often he finished the job and Rohit's measures how big he got when he did not fail. Both are legitimate ways to judge an ODI batter, and neither is the same thing.

Tests: two similar totals, two different careers

The Test totals are close — 4,876 against 4,301 — and the shapes are not. Dhoni was a wicketkeeper who batted seven and averaged 38.09 with six hundreds, one of them a 224 against Australia at Chennai in 2013 that is still the highest Test score by an Indian wicketkeeper. He captained India in 60 Tests, won 27 and took the side to the top of the rankings in 2009 before losing 4-0 in England and 4-0 in Australia inside a year.

Rohit averaged 40.57 with twelve hundreds and had two Test careers rather than one. As a middle-order batter from 2013 to 2019 he made 177 on debut at Eden Gardens and then failed and was dropped, repeatedly. Moved to open in 2019, he made most of his hundreds and his 212 in the years that followed. He captained India in Tests from 2022 and gave it up in May 2025 after a poor run. The full line of Indian captains in the format is in the page on India's Test captains.

Twelve hundreds against six is the meaningful split, and it favours the batter over the keeper — which is exactly what you would expect.

T20 internationals

Rohit's numbers are much larger and his average is lower: 4,231 runs at 32.05 with five hundreds against Dhoni's 1,617 at 37.60 with none. He was the leading run-scorer in men's T20I history when he retired, and he hit more than 650 sixes across international cricket, more than any player.

Dhoni's T20I record is a finisher's record from a period when 126 runs per hundred balls at the death was a competitive rate rather than a liability. His real contribution to the format is not in the batting column at all: he captained a squad of near-unknowns to the first World T20 in 2007, at a tournament India nearly did not bother entering, and that result is the reason the Indian Premier League exists in the form it does.

IPL: five titles each as captain

Dhoni played 278 IPL matches, 248 of them for Chennai Super Kings, and made 5,439 runs at 38.30 with 24 fifties and no hundred. He captained CSK to titles in 2010, 2011, 2018, 2021 and 2023.

Rohit has 7,329 IPL runs, the second-highest total in the competition, and six winner's medals: one as a young player with Deccan Chargers in 2008 and five as Mumbai Indians captain in 2013, 2015, 2017, 2019 and 2020.

Five titles each as captain is the headline, and the two records are close enough that the tie-break usually comes down to preference rather than evidence. Rohit made 1,900 more runs; Dhoni's sides were built around him for longer and reached more finals. The economics that shaped both squads are covered in the page on how the IPL auction works.

The column Rohit does not have

Dhoni took 294 dismissals in Tests, 444 in ODIs and 91 in T20Is, and his 195 international stumpings are more than any wicketkeeper has taken. He did that while captaining in most of those matches, setting fields and changing bowlers from behind the stumps.

There is no equivalent line in Rohit's record and there does not need to be — he was a specialist batter. But any comparison of total contribution has to weigh a decade and a half of keeping against a decade and a half of opening, and the page on India's great wicketkeepers sets out how far ahead of his predecessors Dhoni was.

Two finals, thirteen years apart

The cleanest single contrast in the two careers is a pair of World Cup finals at home.

In 2011 at the Wankhede, Dhoni promoted himself above an in-form Yuvraj Singh to face Muttiah Muralitharan and made 91 not out to win India the World Cup. Rohit was not in that squad; he was left out of the fifteen, which at the time was the low point of his career.

In 2023 at Ahmedabad, Rohit captained India into a World Cup final after ten consecutive wins and lost it to Australia. He made 47 from 31 in that match, attacking from the first over, and it was not enough. Eight months later he captained the side that won the T20 World Cup in Barbados, and walked off the field having retired from the format.

Those three matches carry more weight in how the two men are judged than any career average, which is worth saying plainly rather than pretending otherwise.

Verdict, by question

• ODI average: Dhoni, marginally, and the not-outs explain the margin.
• ODI hundreds, double-centuries and highest score: Rohit, decisively.
• Test hundreds: Rohit. Test runs: Dhoni.
• T20I volume, hundreds and six-hitting: Rohit.
• T20I average: Dhoni.
• Wicketkeeping: Dhoni, a column Rohit does not have.
• IPL runs: Rohit. IPL titles as captain: level, at five each.
• Global titles as captain: Dhoni, three to two.
• Finishing a chase: Dhoni, and it is a skill Rohit was never asked to provide.

Full careers are set out on the pages for MS Dhoni and Rohit Sharma; the player directory and the cricket in India hub carry the surrounding context.

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, in which he did not play. Rohit's international figures are as of 22 July 2026 and his IPL total to 31 May 2026, from the same sources.

Dismissal and stumping totals behind the stumps follow the ESPNcricinfo and ICC record pages. Captaincy title counts are matters of tournament record, and the IPL title years for both franchises come from the competition's own records.

The explanation of Dhoni's ODI average in terms of not-outs is descriptive rather than computed: this page does not calculate a dismissal-adjusted average for either man, and the observation that the two figures measure different things is offered as an argument about what averages capture rather than as a correction to them. The weighting given to the three finals is explicitly a judgement about reputation, not a statistical claim. Figures current as of 27 August 2026.