India ODI most stumpings: All-Time Records

MS Dhoni stumped 123 batters in one-day internationals. It is the India record, the world record, and the only three-figure stumping total in the history of the format. He reached a hundred in September 2017 against Sri Lanka, passing Kumar Sangakkara's 99, and finished 24 clear of it.

A stumping is the rarest of a wicketkeeper's dismissals and the only one he creates rather than accepts. A catch requires the batter to edge; a stumping requires the batter to leave his crease and the keeper to take a spinning ball cleanly and break the wicket before the foot comes down. The whole event is over in less than half a second.

Dhoni made one every 2.8 matches across 350 one-day internationals. Nayan Mongia, second on the India list, made 44 in 140, which is one every 3.2 — a closer rate than the totals suggest, and the strongest argument that this record is about opportunity as much as reflex.

Stumpings for India in ODIs

#	Keeper	Span	Mat	Stumpings	Matches per stumping
1	MS Dhoni	2004-2019	350	123	2.8
2	Nayan Mongia	1994-2000	140	44	3.2

Two names, because those are the two India ODI stumping counts that can be stated with confidence. India's other one-day keepers either played too few matches for a meaningful total or have counts that published sources disagree on, and this page prints what it can verify rather than padding a list.

How 123 compares outside India

Keeper	Country	Mat	Stumpings
MS Dhoni	India	350	123
Kumar Sangakkara	Sri Lanka	404	99
Romesh Kaluwitharana	Sri Lanka	189	75
Moin Khan	Pakistan	219	73
Adam Gilchrist	Australia	287	55

Sangakkara kept in 54 more one-day internationals than Dhoni and made 24 fewer stumpings. Adam Gilchrist, who has more ODI dismissals than any keeper except Sangakkara, made 55 — fewer than half Dhoni's total from 287 matches.

The two Sri Lankans and the Pakistani in this group are the giveaway. Sides that bowl a great deal of spin produce stumping opportunities; sides built on pace do not. Gilchrist kept for an Australia attack of Glenn McGrath, Brett Lee and Jason Gillespie, and stood up to the stumps a fraction as often as Dhoni did.

Romesh Kaluwitharana's 75 in 189 matches — one every 2.5 — is the highest rate in this group and better than Dhoni's. He kept to Muttiah Muralitharan.

What the record needs from the bowlers

Dhoni kept to Ravindra Jadeja, Harbhajan Singh, Ravichandran Ashwin, Anil Kumble, Yuvraj Singh and, late in his career, Kuldeep Yadav and Yuzvendra Chahal. India bowled a higher proportion of spin in one-day cricket across that fifteen-year period than any other major side.

It is also a matter of where the matches were played. India hosted a large share of Dhoni's 350 ODIs on surfaces that turned, and the visiting batters who came down the pitch to a spinner on those pitches were doing so against a keeper standing up.

None of that takes anything away from the 123. The chances existed and had to be converted, and Dhoni's conversion was extraordinary by any measure — but a stumping record is a joint product of a keeper and an attack, and reading it as purely a measure of glovework misses half of what produced it.

The technique

Dhoni took the ball with his hands positioned unconventionally and broke the stumps with a movement that was closer to a flick than a sweep. Coaches spent a decade explaining that it should not work, and it worked for fifteen years.

The specific skill was in the hands rather than the feet. He took the ball early and completed the dismissal in one motion rather than two, which is where the fractions of a second that separate a stumping from a missed one are found. Batters who had spent a career walking down the pitch at other keepers found the margin against him roughly halved.

His fielding and keeping alongside the batting is covered in the guide to India's great wicketkeepers, and the full dismissal record — the catches as well as the stumpings — is on India's ODI wicketkeeper dismissals record.

Mongia's 44

Nayan Mongia made 44 stumpings in 140 one-day internationals between 1994 and 2000, keeping to Anil Kumble, Venkatapathy Raju and Sunil Joshi in an India side that bowled spin heavily at home.

His rate of one every 3.2 matches is close enough to Dhoni's that the difference between the two records is almost entirely career length. Mongia kept in 210 fewer ODIs, in a period when India played roughly twenty-five one-day internationals a year against the forty-odd Dhoni's era saw.

He was also, by the assessment of most who watched both, the more orthodox keeper. Mongia's glovework standing up to Kumble's fast leg-breaks on turning pitches was as difficult a job as an India keeper has had, and his stumping rate reflects it.

Four observations

The record has moved only once in India's one-day history in any meaningful sense: from Mongia to Dhoni. No third India keeper has approached either figure.

Dhoni's 123 stumpings and 321 catches mean 27.7% of his ODI dismissals were stumpings. For Gilchrist the figure is 11.7% and for Sangakkara 20.5%. That proportion, more than the raw total, is what separates his record.

Since Dhoni's last ODI in 2019, India has used four keepers in the format without settling on one, and none has yet reached twenty stumpings. Whether anyone approaches 123 depends on India playing enough one-day cricket for a single keeper to accumulate, which the current calendar makes unlikely.

The world record is unlikely to fall soon for the same structural reason. Sangakkara needed 404 matches for 99, and no keeper currently playing is close to either the match volume or the spin exposure that produced Dhoni's total. Career records for both India keepers are in the player directory, the format's history is in the ODI history guide, and India's spin bowling tradition — without which this record does not exist — in its own guide to Indian spin and across the cricket in India hub.

Sources and method

Dhoni's 123 stumpings from 350 matches were confirmed against his published ODI career record and against the report of him passing Kumar Sangakkara's mark in September 2017. Nayan Mongia's 44 from 140 matches comes from his career line and was cross-checked against the report of Dhoni overtaking his India dismissal record in 2008.

The comparison table gives career stumping totals for four keepers from other countries alongside their match counts, taken from published all-time ODI stumping records. Match counts rather than innings-kept counts are used throughout because innings figures were not available for every keeper in that table to the same standard, and mixing the two would produce rates that are not comparable.

Matches per stumping is computed here by dividing matches by stumpings. It is a blunt measure — a keeper who missed several matches through injury within a series is treated identically to one who played them all — and it is printed only to show that the rate gap between Dhoni and Mongia is far smaller than the totals imply.

The proportion of dismissals that were stumpings, in the closing section, is calculated from each keeper's published catch and stumping totals. The remarks about Dhoni's technique and Mongia's glovework are descriptive judgements drawn from contemporary accounts rather than anything computed, and are labelled as such. All figures were verified in the final week of August 2026.