India ODI most ducks: All-Time Records

Sachin Tendulkar was out for nought twenty times in one-day internationals for India. Javagal Srinath is second with nineteen, Anil Kumble and Yuvraj Singh have eighteen each, and Harbhajan Singh seventeen. Nobody else has reached that mark.

A ducks list is the one record table where the leader is the leader for a reason nobody minds. Tendulkar batted 452 times for India, more than any other player has, and 4.4% of those innings ended without a run. That is a lower failure rate than any specialist bowler on this page and lower than most of the batters.

The count and the rate point in opposite directions, and the whole interest of the page sits in the distance between them. Four of the top ten are bowlers who batted at nine, ten or eleven; they collected their ducks in a third as many innings as the batters took to collect theirs.

The ten most ducks for India in ODIs

Rank	Player	Mat	Inns	Ducks	Duck %	Innings per duck
1	Sachin Tendulkar	463	452	20	4.4%	22.6
2	Javagal Srinath	229	121	19	15.7%	6.4
=3	Anil Kumble	269	134	18	13.4%	7.4
=3	Yuvraj Singh	301	275	18	6.5%	15.3
5	Harbhajan Singh	234	126	17	13.5%	7.4
=6	Rohit Sharma	273	265	16	6.0%	16.6
=6	Virat Kohli	302	290	16	5.5%	18.1
=6	Sourav Ganguly	308	297	16	5.4%	18.6
=9	Zaheer Khan	194	96	14	14.6%	6.9
=9	Suresh Raina	226	194	14	7.2%	13.9

Tail-enders and top-order batters are not on the same list

Group	Players	Innings	Ducks	Duck %
Specialist bowlers	4	477	68	14.3%
Batters and all-rounders	6	1,773	100	5.6%

Srinath, Kumble, Harbhajan Singh and Zaheer Khan batted 477 times between them and were out for nought on 68 of those occasions. The six batters needed 1,773 innings to be dismissed for nought a hundred times.

A number eleven walking out with three overs left, against a bowler with the field up and a new ball, is being asked to hit. He will frequently be out first ball, and nobody in the dressing room regards that as a failure. Javagal Srinath took 315 one-day wickets for India and his batting record is a rounding error on his career, but it puts him second on this page.

Reverse the sort and the same table says something else entirely. On duck percentage the order runs Srinath, Zaheer Khan, Harbhajan Singh, Kumble, then the batters — the exact reverse of the intuition that a ducks list identifies unreliable batting.

Tendulkar's twenty in context

Twenty ducks from 452 innings is one every 22.6 times he walked out. Across the same career he made 49 hundreds and 96 fifties, so he passed fifty 145 times and made nought twenty times — a ratio better than seven to one.

The comparison worth making is with the two batters closest to him on this page. Virat Kohli has sixteen ducks in 290 innings and 133 scores of fifty or more; Rohit Sharma has sixteen in 265 and 96. Neither has a materially different failure rate to Sachin Tendulkar; all three simply batted enough times for the absolute number to grow.

That is the structural point about this record. Ducks accumulate with innings, and innings accumulate with quality, so the top of an India ducks list is close to a list of the batters India trusted most. The exceptions are the four bowlers, and they are exceptions because they batted in a position where a duck costs the side almost nothing.

Ganguly, Yuvraj and the middle of the order

Sourav Ganguly's sixteen ducks in 297 innings, at 5.4%, is the lowest rate of any batter on the page. He opened for most of his one-day career, which is the position most exposed to a new ball and to the first over of a match, and he still failed to score less often per innings than anyone else here.

Yuvraj Singh at 6.5% and Suresh Raina at 7.2% are the two highest rates among the batters, and both batted in the middle order in the second half of an innings. A number five arriving in the fortieth over has a smaller margin than an opener: he cannot spend ten balls getting in, and the ball he is most likely to face first is a yorker or a slower ball with the field back.

Raina's fourteen came from 194 innings while he scored at 93.50 per hundred balls, and the two facts are the same fact. A batter told to hit from the first delivery will be out for nought more often than one told to see off the new ball.

Reading the table by rate instead

Rank by rate	Player	Ducks	Inns	Duck %
1	Javagal Srinath	19	121	15.7%
2	Zaheer Khan	14	96	14.6%
3	Harbhajan Singh	17	126	13.5%
4	Anil Kumble	18	134	13.4%
5	Suresh Raina	14	194	7.2%
6	Yuvraj Singh	18	275	6.5%
7	Rohit Sharma	16	265	6.0%
8	Virat Kohli	16	290	5.5%
9	Sourav Ganguly	16	297	5.4%
10	Sachin Tendulkar	20	452	4.4%

The leader of the count column is last on the rate column, and the four bowlers occupy the top four places. Between Kumble at 13.4% and Raina at 7.2% there is a gap of more than six percentage points with nothing in it, which is the line separating a batting position from a bowling one.

The batters are clustered tightly: five of the six sit between 5.4% and 7.2%, across careers spanning 1992 to 2026. India's top-order failure rate in one-day cricket has been remarkably stable for three decades, whatever else about the format changed.

Neither ranking is the honest one on its own. The count answers "who has made the most noughts", which is what the record book records; the rate answers "who failed most often", which is what a reader usually means. They disagree entirely, and a page that printed only one of them would mislead.

Every India duck since 2002, sorted by where the batter came in

The career table is a list of ten men. A different question — how likely any India batter is to make nought from a given position in the order — needs every innings India has played, not the ten largest careers. The Cricsheet ball-by-ball archive supplies that for the 526 India ODIs it covers, from June 2002 to July 2026: 4,233 individual batting innings, of which 307 ended in a duck.

Position	Innings	Ducks	Duck rate
1	519	32	6.2%
2	519	22	4.2%
3	511	36	7.0%
4	495	32	6.5%
5	471	34	7.2%
6	427	14	3.3%
7	363	29	8.0%
8	303	26	8.6%
9	251	29	11.6%
10	206	25	12.1%
11	168	28	16.7%

The gradient below number seven is exactly what the career table implied and could not prove: a number eleven for India makes nought in one innings out of six, a number ten in one out of eight, an opener in one out of sixteen. Srinath, Kumble, Harbhajan Singh and Zaheer Khan were not unusually poor batters for their slot. They batted in the slot where the rate is four times the top order's, for two hundred matches each.

Two positions break the pattern in opposite directions. Number six, at 3.3%, has the lowest duck rate of any position in the India order — barely half the openers' rate. That is largely one man: MS Dhoni batted more India ODI innings at six than anyone, and a finisher who arrives with eight overs left and the field back is very rarely dismissed before he has scored, because the bowling he faces is defensive from the first ball.

Number three, at 7.0%, is the highest rate in the top six despite being the position India has given to its best batter for most of the period. A number three can be in before the first over is out, facing a new ball with a slip cordon still in place, and he arrives without the sighting time an opener gets. It is the most exposed job in the order and the numbers say so.

How India get out for nought

Dismissal	Ducks	Share
Caught	153	49.8%
Bowled	64	20.8%
LBW	56	18.2%
Run out	18	5.9%
Stumped	8	2.6%
Caught and bowled	7	2.3%

Just under half of India's ODI ducks are catches, which is a lower share than caught dismissals take across all India ODI wickets. The reason is at the other end of the table: bowled and lbw together account for 39% of ducks, and a batter who has not yet scored is disproportionately likely to be beaten in a straight line rather than to edge one. He has not worked out the pace of the pitch, and the ball that gets him is usually the one that comes back.

Ninety-two of the 307 were golden ducks, out to the first ball faced — very nearly a third. That is the figure that best captures what a duck actually is in this format. It is far more often a single delivery that beats a batter cold than a passage of play in which he fails to score.

Eighteen were run out for nought, which is the cruellest entry in the table because it is generally not the batter's own doing. All eight stumpings came off spin, and six of them fell in the last twenty overs to batters who had come in late and were charging the first ball they faced. Only the keeper is required for that dismissal, and the shot that produces it is the one a duck most often ends on.

The duck rate has halved

Era	Innings	Ducks	Duck rate
2002-2007	1,058	94	8.9%
2008-2013	1,365	108	7.9%
2014-2019	1,023	69	6.7%
2020-2026	787	36	4.6%

This is the sharpest trend on the page and the one that most complicates the top table. India's rate of being dismissed for nought has fallen by nearly half in twenty-four years, from close to one innings in eleven to one in twenty-two.

Part of it is the bat and the pitch. Part of it is that India now bat deeper: a side that picks bowlers who can bat has fewer genuine number elevens, and the eleventh man reaches the crease less often because the innings is more likely to last fifty overs. But the largest single component is that India lose fewer early wickets than they did, so fewer batters face a hard new ball with the field up.

It also explains the last observation in the previous section better than career length alone does. Nobody who debuted after 2010 is near this list partly because they have played fewer innings, and partly because the innings they have played were played in a period when India's whole side made nought half as often.

The bowlers who did it most

Bowler	India ducks taken
Mitchell Johnson	11
Dale Steyn	10
Mitchell Starc	9
Lasith Malinga	9
Kyle Mills	5
Saeed Ajmal	5
Nathan Coulter-Nile	4
Angelo Mathews	4

Four names sit clear at the top and all four are fast bowlers who took the new ball. Johnson, Steyn, Starc and Malinga between them dismissed India batters for nought 39 times, and none of them is a spinner.

That is the same finding as the dismissal-mode table read from the bowling end. A duck is overwhelmingly a new-ball event: the bowler is quick, the ball is hard, the field is up, and the batter has had no time. Saeed Ajmal at five is the only frontline spinner in the group, and his five are of a different kind entirely: every one came after the twenty-ninth over against a batter from number seven down, three of them lbw. A spinner collects his ducks by bowling at the tail, a fast bowler by bowling at the top.

Opponent and venue

Opponent	India innings	Ducks	Duck rate
Australia	731	61	8.3%
England	568	45	7.9%
Sri Lanka	701	55	7.8%
South Africa	414	30	7.2%
Pakistan	379	27	7.1%
Bangladesh	237	16	6.8%
West Indies	491	32	6.5%
New Zealand	476	31	6.5%
Zimbabwe	144	7	4.9%

Australia have dismissed India batters for nought more often than anyone in both count and rate, which follows from having had Johnson, Starc and a succession of others willing to bowl fast with a new ball. England are second on rate and the gap to Sri Lanka is inside a tenth of a percentage point.

The spread is narrower than the era spread, and that is worth noticing. The difference between India's hardest and easiest Test-playing opponent on this measure is under two percentage points; the difference between India in 2005 and India in 2025 is more than four. Who India played has mattered less to their duck rate than when they played.

Venue divides the same way but more gently. In the 191 archived ODIs at Indian grounds, India's duck rate is 6.7%; in the 335 played away or at neutral venues it is 7.6%. Home conditions are worth about one duck in every hundred innings, which is real but far smaller than either the era effect or the batting-position effect.

What a duck costs

A duck is not a uniform event. An opener out for nought in the first over leaves the side one down with fifty overs to bat and a new batter facing a hard ball; a number ten out for nought in the forty-eighth over costs a delivery.

That asymmetry is why the four bowlers on this page attract no criticism for their rates and why a top-order duck is remembered. Sourav Ganguly's sixteen were nearly all made opening the batting, and each of them handed the opposition a wicket at the moment it was worth most.

It is also why the not-out convention matters here in the opposite direction to the way it matters on an averages list. A batter dismissed for nought has both an innings and a dismissal recorded; the statistic has no way of registering that one nought mattered ten times more than another.

Four things worth noting

There is no wicketkeeper in the top ten. MS Dhoni batted 294 times for India in ODIs, more than everyone on this page except Tendulkar, Ganguly and Kohli, and was not out 83 times — the not-out habit that lifts his average also removes chances to make nought.

Three of the four bowlers on the list took more than 260 ODI wickets for India, and all four are among the country's ten leading one-day wicket-takers, set out on India's leading ODI wicket-takers. Their batting record is a by-product of having played 200-odd matches as frontline bowlers.

Anil Kumble and Harbhajan Singh have almost identical lines here — eighteen ducks in 134 innings and seventeen in 126 — which is a coincidence of two long spin-bowling careers batting in the same slot two decades apart.

Nobody who debuted for India after 2010 is on this list. That is partly a function of career length and partly of squad rotation: the modern India side plays fewer ODIs per player per year, so the innings counts that produce a large duck total accrue more slowly. Career records for everyone here are in the player directory, the aggregate batting picture is on India's most ODI runs, and the format's history sits in the ODI history guide and across the cricket in India hub.

Sources and method

Duck counts, matches and innings come from published India ODI ducks records, cross-checked player by player against each player's career line for matches and innings. Where a compiled list and a career page disagreed on innings, the career page was preferred, and no row was published unless the two agreed on the duck count itself.

Duck percentage and innings per duck are computed here from the ducks and innings columns and are not quoted figures. Percentage is ducks divided by innings batted, not by matches played, which matters for the bowlers: Zaheer Khan played 194 ODIs and batted in 96 of them, so using matches would halve his rate and describe nothing real.

The two-group table sorts the ten by principal role. Yuvraj Singh and Suresh Raina both bowled useful one-day spells and are placed with the batters because that is where their selection value sat; Zaheer Khan and Javagal Srinath never batted above eight. That assignment is a judgement rather than a data field.

The five sections computed from ball-by-ball data — batting position, dismissal mode, era, bowler and opponent, together with the golden-duck count and the home/away split — come from the Cricsheet archive (cricsheet.org, ODC-BY 1.0). It holds 526 India men's ODIs played between 29 June 2002 and 19 July 2026, containing 4,233 individual batting innings and 307 ducks. Cricsheet's coverage of India in this format is effectively complete from 2003 and very thin before it, so those figures describe the archived window and not the whole history of India in the format. They are deliberately not used to revise the career counts in the top table, which cover careers beginning as early as 1989.

The method was validated against the page before it was used. Recomputing Virat Kohli's ODI ducks from the archive up to the cut-off of this page's career table returns 16 in 290 innings, matching the row above exactly; carried through to July 2026 the archive returns 18, the two extra having come in Australia in October 2025. A duck is counted where a batter was dismissed having scored no runs — a batter who was not out for nought is not counted, and one retired hurt without scoring is excluded. Batting position is the order in which a player arrived at the crease in that innings, derived from the deliveries themselves, so a nightwatchman-style promotion counts at the position he actually batted. Home means a ground in India; neutral venues count as away.

This page ranks only the top ten because below fourteen ducks the list becomes a long tie of players on twelve and thirteen, and separating them would imply a precision the underlying record does not carry. Innings counts here reflect a records snapshot taken slightly earlier than the career figures used elsewhere on this site, so Kohli and Rohit Sharma appear with marginally fewer innings than their current totals; the duck counts themselves were current in the last week of August 2026.