Barabati Stadium Pitch Report & Average Scores | Cuttack

Barabati Stadium has the widest format split of any Indian ground in this survey. In eight men's one-day internationals it has produced 40.8 runs per wicket — the highest figure at any of the ten venues examined — and an average first innings of 291. In four men's T20 internationals it has produced 18.2 runs per wicket and 6.81 runs an over, both the lowest of the ten. The same square, in the same decade, has been the most productive fifty-over surface in the set and the most hostile twenty-over one.

Neither figure is a small-sample accident in the way that a single freak scorecard would be. All eight fifty-over matches produced a first innings of at least 211, and six produced 246 or more. Three of the four T20 internationals ended with a side dismissed for under 100: India for 92 against South Africa in October 2015, Sri Lanka for 87 in December 2017, and South Africa for 74 in December 2025.

The ground is one of India's older venues, built in 1958 and run by the Odisha Cricket Association, and it staged its only Test in January 1987, against Sri Lanka — a match remembered for Dilip Vengsarkar's 166 and for Kapil Dev's three-hundredth Test wicket. It has not held a Test since, and its Indian Premier League life ended in 2014 after seven matches.

Scoring by format

Figures are computed from the Cricsheet ball-by-ball archive for the ground. First-innings means count only completed innings.

Format	Matches in archive	Span	Mean 1st innings	Median	Runs per over	Runs per wicket	Boundary share
ODI (men)	8	Nov 2003 – Feb 2025	291	287	5.77	40.8	11.4%
T20I (men)	4	Oct 2015 – Dec 2025	149	161	6.81	18.2	13.3%
IPL	7	Mar 2010 – May 2014	168	170	8.06	28.5	16.7%

The IPL row sits between the two and looks entirely normal, which is itself informative: whatever makes the fifty-over game so productive and the twenty-over international game so difficult here is not a fixed property of the pitch. All seven tournament matches fell between 2010 and 2014, so that row is also the oldest data on this page.

The fifty-over record, match by match

With eight matches, the individual scorecards are more useful than the mean.

Date	First innings	Second innings	Result
Nov 2003	India 246 for 9	New Zealand 249 for 6	New Zealand won by 4 wickets
Nov 2008	England 270 for 4	India 273 for 4	India won by 6 wickets
Dec 2009	Sri Lanka 239	India 243 for 3	India won by 7 wickets
Nov 2011	West Indies 211 for 9	India 213 for 9	India won by 1 wicket
Nov 2014	India 363 for 5	Sri Lanka 194	India won by 169 runs
Jan 2017	India 381 for 6	England 366 for 8	India won by 15 runs
Dec 2019	West Indies 315 for 5	India 316 for 6	India won by 4 wickets
Feb 2025	England 304	India 308 for 6	India won by 4 wickets

Six of the eight went to the side batting second, and only two totals have ever been successfully defended here: India's 363 for 5 against Sri Lanka in 2014 and their 381 for 6 against England in 2017. That second match produced 747 runs in a day, with Yuvraj Singh making 150 and MS Dhoni 134 in the first innings and England falling 16 short. Everything below 316 has been chased down.

The 2011 match is the counter-example that proves the point about the surface rather than the result: West Indies made 211 for 9 and India needed 48.5 overs and nine wickets to get past it. Low totals here are not necessarily easy; they are just rare.

The twenty-over record, and why it looks nothing like it

Date	First innings	Second innings	Result
Oct 2015	India 92	South Africa 96 for 4	South Africa won by 6 wickets
Dec 2017	India 180 for 3	Sri Lanka 87	India won by 93 runs
Jun 2022	India 148 for 6	South Africa 149 for 6	South Africa won by 4 wickets
Dec 2025	India 175 for 6	South Africa 74	India won by 101 runs

Four matches, four collapses of one kind or another. In every one of them the captain who won the toss chose to field, and the results split two apiece. India's 92 in October 2015 came in 17.2 overs; South Africa's 74 in December 2025 in 12.3.

Phase	Men's T20I runs per over	Men's T20I balls per wicket
Overs 1–6	6.51	18.4
Overs 7–15	6.29	14.4
Overs 16–20	8.83	17.2

The middle-overs figure is the standout: a wicket every 14.4 balls between overs seven and fifteen, which is comfortably the most destructive middle phase of any ground in this survey and lower even than the death-overs rate at the same venue. That is the shape of an innings that never gets going rather than one that accelerates and then falls apart.

Pace against spin

Wickets credited to the bowler only. Occasional bowlers who could not be classified are excluded from the shares.

Format	Pace wickets	Spin wickets	Spin share of overs	Pace average	Spin average	Pace economy	Spin economy
ODI (men)	68	34	35%	45.2	39.4	6.24	5.02
T20I (men)	35	18	30%	20.0	16.1	7.05	6.88
IPL	36	26	38%	35.4	30.6	8.63	7.50

A pace bowler in a one-day international at Cuttack has averaged 45.2 and conceded 6.24 an over. That average is the worst for seam at any ground in this set and the economy the second worst, and the explanation is not complicated: the outfield is quick, the boundaries are reachable, and evening dew has repeatedly made the ball difficult to hold in the second innings. Spin is cheaper in every format at this ground without exception, which is unusual, though its fifty-over average of 39.4 is hardly flattering either.

The leading wicket-takers reflect that. Ravindra Jadeja has ten one-day wickets here, more than anyone; Yuzvendra Chahal's five in four T20 internationals are the most in that format. The role spin plays across Indian conditions generally is set out in the guide to India's spin bowling tradition.

Toss and result

Format	Chose to bat	Chose to field	Bat-first side won	Chasing side won
ODI (men)	3	5	2	6
T20I (men)	0	4	2	2
IPL	2	5	4	3

Fourteen of the nineteen men's matches in the archive saw the toss-winner choose to field, and in the fifty-over game that has been the right call three times out of five. Two wins from eight for the side batting first is the strongest fifty-over chase bias at any ground in this survey — stronger even than at the Sawai Mansingh Stadium in Jaipur — and unlike Jaipur, Cuttack's version comes with the highest runs-per-wicket figure in the set, so the chasing side is not simply being handed a small target.

The IPL column runs the other way, with four wins from seven for the side batting first, but seven matches a decade ago is not evidence of much.

Dew, humidity and the seasonal window

Cuttack sits in the Mahanadi delta, roughly thirty kilometres inland from the Bay of Bengal, and it is among the most humid international venues in the country. Its fixtures cluster between late October and February, after the retreating monsoon and before the pre-summer heat, which means almost every match here has been played in cool, damp evening air.

Dew is the single most important variable and it is the most plausible explanation for the chase record. Once the outfield wets, the ball skids rather than grips, spinners lose control of the seam and the death-overs plan a bowling captain arrived with stops working. That reading is consistent with the fifty-over pace economy of 6.24, with the spin economy of 5.02 being the lower of the two despite spin bowling only a third of the overs, and with the fact that all six successful chases needed at least 42 overs — these have been long second innings rather than blitzes.

It does not explain the twenty-over record, which is the honest gap in this analysis. Four matches producing three sub-100 totals suggests the pitches used for those fixtures were prepared differently — greener, or slower, or simply used less — but the archive does not record which strip was used, so the observation stops there. The seasonal logic behind the Indian calendar is set out in the monsoon and the cricket season, and the variety of surfaces available across the country in Indian pitch types and conditions.

Five things worth carrying away

• The format split is the story. 40.8 runs per wicket in fifty-over cricket, 18.2 in twenty-over internationals. No other ground in this survey comes close to that spread.
• Only two totals have ever been defended in an ODI here, and both were above 360. Anything from 316 downwards has been chased.
• The middle overs are lethal in T20 internationals. A wicket every 14.4 balls between overs seven and fifteen is the most dangerous middle phase of the ten grounds surveyed.
• Seam bowling has been punished in fifty-over cricket. An average of 45.2 and an economy of 6.24 are the worst figures for pace at any venue here.
• The venue's Test and IPL histories are both closed. One Test in January 1987 and seven tournament matches ending in May 2014. Anything you read about Cuttack as a red-ball or franchise venue is history, not forecast.

Ranked lists of team totals, individual innings and bowling returns are on the Barabati Stadium records page. For the venue's standing among Indian grounds see India's iconic cricket stadiums, for the country's fifty-over history the guide to ODI cricket in India, and for everything else the hub at cricket in India.

Sources and method

Every scoring, toss, phase and bowler-type figure on this page is computed from the Cricsheet ball-by-ball archive (cricsheet.org, ODC-BY 1.0) as read in August 2026. The archive holds eight men's ODIs at this ground from November 2003, four men's T20 internationals from October 2015 and seven IPL matches between March 2010 and May 2014. It does not include the January 1987 Test, which predates ball-by-ball records, nor the ground's earlier one-day internationals from the 1980s and 1990s. Counts on this page are counts within the archive, not a complete fixture history. No women's international is recorded at the venue in the archive.

Means, medians, innings-by-innings rates, toss outcomes and phase splits are computed from the deliveries rather than quoted. Wickets are credited to a bowler only for caught, bowled, lbw, stumped, caught and bowled or hit wicket, so pace and spin columns need not sum to the format total; the pace-or-spin classification is an editorial judgement by bowler name, with the unclassifiable omitted rather than guessed.

The 1958 construction date, the January 1987 Test details and the ground's seating of roughly 45,000 come from Odisha Cricket Association and ESPNcricinfo ground information and are descriptive, not computed; no capacity figure is used in any calculation. The attribution of the chase record to dew is an interpretation of the pattern in the data and of the venue's climate, not a measured quantity, and the twenty-over record is explicitly flagged above as unexplained by it.