Arun Jaitley Stadium Pitch Report & Average Scores | Delhi
Written and checked by CricketTakenPublished Cricket in India12 min read
The square at the Arun Jaitley Stadium has a reputation for being slow, low and old-fashioned, and for most of its life that reputation was earned. It is no longer accurate. Across the 101 completed first innings in the Indian Premier League ball-by-ball record at the ground, the average is 173; across the five matches played there in 2024 it was 235. In April 2026 Delhi Capitals made 264 for 2 and lost, Punjab Kings chasing 265 for 4 with seven balls to spare. Two days later, on the same square, Delhi were bowled out for 75.
That spread is the honest answer to "what is the pitch like at Delhi". The ground is at the older end of the Indian circuit — a Test venue since November 1948, second only to Eden Gardens in continuous international use — and the DDCA has relaid parts of the square and rebuilt the drainage since the 2019 renaming. It carries both red and black soil, which lets the curators prepare a genuinely different surface for a Test than for a T20, and the numbers below show that difference clearly rather than averaging it away.
In the red-ball game the ground is still a spinner's, and emphatically so: of 243 wickets in the eight Tests with complete ball-by-ball data, 159 fell to spin. In white-ball cricket it is a pace-dominated venue with a fast outfield and short straight boundaries. Any single sentence describing "the Delhi pitch" is therefore describing one format and misleading you about the other two.
Average scores at Delhi, format by format
All figures are computed from the Cricsheet ball-by-ball archive for this ground, which covers Feroz Shah Kotla and Arun Jaitley Stadium as one venue. First-innings averages count only innings that were completed — all out, or a full quota of overs — so rain-shortened games are excluded rather than dragging the mean down.
| Format | Matches counted | Span | Average 1st-innings score | Median | Runs per over | Runs per wicket |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Test (men) | 8 | Nov 2007 – Oct 2025 | 383 | 319 | 3.13 | 34.3 |
| ODI (men) | 17 | Apr 2005 – Nov 2023 | 254 | 239 | 5.01 | 27.7 |
| T20I (men) | 12 | Mar 2016 – Mar 2026 | 168 | 154 | 7.97 | 26.5 |
| IPL | 104 | Apr 2008 – May 2026 | 173 | 171 | 8.36 | 28.1 |
Two of the eight Test first innings in that sample were declarations rather than completed innings, so the Test average is a measure of how much a side has been able to make batting first, not of how many runs the pitch allows before ten wickets fall. The ODI median of 239 sits well below the mean of 254 because three totals — South Africa's 428 for 5 against Sri Lanka and Australia's 399 for 8 against the Netherlands, both in the 2023 World Cup, and West Indies' 330 in 2011 — pull the average up. Strip those and the ground's fifty-over history is a 240-to-250 venue, not a 300 one.
Where first-innings totals actually land
Averages hide the shape of the distribution, which is what a captain is really reading at the toss. These are the bands the completed first innings fall into.
| Format | Band | Innings |
|---|---|---|
| ODI | under 200 | 4 |
| ODI | 200–249 | 5 |
| ODI | 250–299 | 3 |
| ODI | 300–349 | 2 |
| ODI | 350+ | 2 |
| IPL | under 120 | 9 |
| IPL | 120–149 | 14 |
| IPL | 150–179 | 34 |
| IPL | 180–209 | 29 |
| IPL | 210+ | 15 |
Two-thirds of IPL first innings at the ground land between 150 and 210. The nine sub-120 scores are the tail worth noticing: this square still collapses. Delhi Daredevils were bowled out for 66 by Mumbai Indians in May 2017 and for 83 by Chennai Super Kings in April 2013, and Delhi Capitals for 75 in April 2026 — a total Royal Challengers Bengaluru overhauled inside seven overs.
The season-by-season IPL trend
The clearest thing in the whole dataset is that the venue changed. Delhi hosted no IPL matches in 2009, 2020 or 2022, so the series has gaps, but the direction is not ambiguous.
| Season | Matches | Average 1st-innings score |
|---|---|---|
| 2008 | 5 | 175 |
| 2010 | 7 | 173 |
| 2011 | 6 | 157 |
| 2012 | 8 | 165 |
| 2013 | 8 | 154 |
| 2014 | 5 | 159 |
| 2015 | 5 | 147 |
| 2016 | 7 | 160 |
| 2017 | 7 | 184 |
| 2018 | 6 | 178 |
| 2019 | 7 | 156 |
| 2021 | 4 | 195 |
| 2023 | 7 | 176 |
| 2024 | 5 | 235 |
| 2025 | 7 | 203 |
| 2026 | 7 | 172 |
The 2015 figure of 147 and the 2024 figure of 235 are the same ground eight years apart. Some of that is the wider inflation of T20 batting, but not all of it: the relaid square drains faster and holds less moisture, and the ball skids on rather than gripping the way it used to. The 2026 average of 172 is a useful corrective against treating 2024 as the new normal — that season contained both the 529 runs of the Delhi–Punjab match and the 75 all out.
Toss and chase: what captains choose, and what works
| Format | Chose to bat | Chose to field | Bat-first side won | Chasing side won |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Test (men) | 8 | 0 | 2 | 4 |
| ODI (men) | 9 | 8 | 9 | 7 |
| T20I (men) | 2 | 10 | 4 | 8 |
| IPL | 39 | 65 | 47 | 54 |
The Test column is the striking one. Every captain who has won the toss at Delhi in the ball-by-ball era has batted, and of the six Tests that produced a result, the side batting first won two. India have won six and drawn two of those eight, four of the wins coming with the ball in hand — including chases of 203, 276, 158 and 118. Fourth innings here have been short and successful rather than long and fraught.
In the IPL the split is close enough to be a coin toss over 101 decided matches, which is itself the finding: Delhi is not a venue where the toss decides the game, unlike the dew-affected evening grounds. Captains field first about two-thirds of the time anyway. The largest total successfully chased is Punjab's 265 for 4 in April 2026; the largest successfully defended is Sunrisers Hyderabad's 278 for 3 in May 2025, when Kolkata Knight Riders were bowled out for 168.
Pace against spin
Wickets are counted only where the bowler earned them — caught, bowled, lbw, stumped, hit wicket — so run-outs are excluded. A small number of part-time bowlers could not be classified with confidence and are left out of the shares.
| Format | Pace wickets | Spin wickets | Spin share of overs | Pace average | Spin average | Pace economy | Spin economy |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Test (men) | 84 | 159 | 57% | 43.8 | 28.6 | 3.13 | 2.94 |
| ODI (men) | 154 | 90 | 32% | 32.8 | 23.4 | 5.26 | 4.58 |
| T20I (men) | 89 | 42 | 26% | 31.2 | 22.8 | 8.13 | 8.09 |
| IPL | 716 | 364 | 33% | 32.1 | 28.2 | 8.84 | 7.92 |
A pace bowler in a Test at Delhi has averaged nearly 44 runs a wicket. That is the single most useful number on this page for anyone reading a red-ball team sheet: seam does not get rewarded here, and the two leading wicket-takers in the archive are Ravichandran Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja with 33 each. Nathan Lyon's 7 for 94 in March 2013 and Jadeja's 7 for 42 from 12.1 overs in February 2023 came off the same surface that gave the quicks on either side almost nothing.
The white-ball picture inverts. Spin bowls a third of the overs at most and takes wickets more cheaply than pace in every format, but in the twenty-over game its economy advantage all but disappears — which is why captains use it in short bursts through the middle rather than at the death. India's broader reliance on that skill is the subject of the guide to the Indian spin bowling tradition; the counter-story of the country's quick bowlers sits in the evolution of Indian fast bowling.
How a T20 innings is scored here
Splitting every T20 delivery at the ground by phase gives the shape of an innings rather than just its total.
| Phase | IPL runs per over | IPL balls per wicket | Men's T20I runs per over |
|---|---|---|---|
| Overs 1–6 | 8.24 | 25.2 | 7.56 |
| Overs 7–15 | 7.86 | 23.9 | 7.48 |
| Overs 16–20 | 9.52 | 12.7 | 9.56 |
The middle overs are the cheapest phase, and only just — the drop from powerplay to middle is under half a run an over, far shallower than at grounds where spin genuinely grips. What Delhi does have is a severe death phase: a wicket every 12.7 balls in the last five, against one every 24 through the first fifteen. Boundaries account for 17.9 per cent of all IPL deliveries at the ground and a third of balls are dots, both figures at the high-scoring end for an Indian venue.
Test surfaces: why the second and third days matter most
Splitting Test innings by their position in the match shows where the pitch turns from placid to difficult.
| Innings of the match | Runs | Wickets | Runs per wicket |
|---|---|---|---|
| First | 3,061 | 69 | 44.4 |
| Second | 2,338 | 80 | 29.2 |
| Third | 1,815 | 65 | 27.9 |
| Fourth | 1,352 | 36 | 37.6 |
Bat first and the first innings has been worth 44 runs a wicket. The second and third innings, played on days two to four, drop to under 30. The fourth-innings figure of 37.6 is an artefact of small chases rather than an easy pitch — only 36 wickets have fallen in fourth innings here, because the targets have been modest and reached. India's 613 for 7 declared against Australia in October 2008, with Gautam Gambhir making 206 and VVS Laxman 200, and Virat Kohli's 243 against Sri Lanka in December 2017, both came in first innings. So did India's 518 for 5 declared against West Indies in October 2025, built on Yashasvi Jaiswal's 175.
Seasonal caveats
The ground's international calendar clusters in two windows and they are not the same pitch. Tests and late-season ODIs fall between October and February, when Delhi mornings are cold, damp and often smoggy; the ball moves for an hour and then stops, and the square dries out and takes spin as the match goes on. IPL matches from late March to May are played in dry heat with a hard, fast outfield, which is most of the reason the boundary percentage is so high. There is no monsoon cricket here — the reasons the Indian season is shaped the way it is are set out in the guide to the monsoon and the cricket calendar.
Evening dew is real but modest by the standards of Kolkata or Cuttack, and it shows up in the chase numbers rather than in the toss: 54 IPL chases won against 47 defences is a mild tilt, not a decisive one.
What the tables do not tell you
- The ground's two extremes both predate the archive. West Indies made 644 for 8 declared here in 1959 and India were bowled out for 75 by West Indies in 1987. Neither has complete ball-by-ball data, so neither appears in any table above, but they remain the venue's highest and lowest Test totals.
- Delhi's most famous bowling performance is not a spin-friendliness statistic. Anil Kumble took all ten Pakistani wickets for 74 on 7 February 1999, and India won by 212 runs. It happened on a fourth-day surface that had already been used for three days of a low-scoring Test, and it is the only ten-wicket innings in India.
- The relay changed the ceiling more than the floor. The 2024 and 2025 IPL averages are the two highest in the ground's history, but the sub-120 collapses did not stop: three of the nine happened in 2013, 2017 and 2026 respectively. A faster surface punishes a bad batting innings as efficiently as it rewards a good one.
- Spin here is an economy option, not a strike option, in T20. It concedes 7.92 an over in the IPL against pace's 8.84, but its strike rate is almost identical. The wickets come from pace at the death.
- Short straight boundaries do the work the pitch does not. Delhi's playing area is among the tighter international squares in India, and the six count in the IPL archive reflects it. Comparison across the country's grounds — including which of them genuinely produce turn — is covered in Indian pitch types and conditions.
For the ranked lists of individual and team performances at the ground rather than its scoring behaviour, see the Arun Jaitley Stadium records page. The venue's place in the wider national picture is covered in the guide to India's iconic cricket stadiums and in the survey of Indian Test cricket grounds; the country hub at cricket in India collects the rest. For a direct contrast with a genuinely seam-friendly Indian surface, the Mohali pitch report is the useful comparison.
Sources and method
Every scoring figure on this page is computed from the Cricsheet ball-by-ball archive (cricsheet.org, ODC-BY 1.0), read as at August 2026, treating Feroz Shah Kotla and the Arun Jaitley Stadium as a single venue. The archive is not a complete history of the ground: it holds eight men's Tests from November 2007, seventeen men's ODIs from April 2005, twelve men's T20 internationals from March 2016 and 104 IPL matches from April 2008, and at least one men's T20 international played at the ground in the 2016 World T20 is absent from it. Counts on this page are counts of matches in that archive, not of matches ever played here.
Women's internationals at the ground — including the 2016 Women's World T20 group games and the September 2025 India–Australia ODI — are excluded from every table so the men's format averages are not blended with a different scoring context.
Averages, medians, phase splits, toss outcomes and bowler-type splits are computed, not quoted. Bowler classification into pace and spin is editorial: a small number of occasional bowlers could not be classified with confidence and are excluded from those shares rather than guessed at, which is why the pace and spin wicket columns do not always sum to the format total. Pre-2005 landmarks — the 1948 first Test, the 1959 and 1987 Test extremes, Kumble's ten-wicket innings — are described from published match records and are not counted into any table. Capacity, soil and renaming details come from DDCA and ESPNcricinfo ground information; capacity figures published for the venue vary between roughly 35,000 and 41,000 and are not used in any calculation here.