Ekana Cricket Stadium Pitch Report & Average Scores | Lucknow

The Bharat Ratna Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee Ekana Cricket Stadium is the newest of the ten Indian venues surveyed in this series and the only one whose square was designed from the start with two soils in it. Some strips are laid on local black soil, which grips and turns; others use red soil trucked in from western India, which bounces and skids. A curator here is choosing not just how much grass to leave but which kind of pitch to play on, and the results in the data are correspondingly bimodal.

That shows up most clearly in the twenty-over game. Across three men's T20 internationals the ground has produced just 6.84 runs an over, near the slowest twenty-over rate in this whole survey, while across twenty-nine Indian Premier League matches it has produced 8.46, which is entirely normal. The internationals include a January 2023 game in which New Zealand were bowled out for 99 and India needed 19.5 overs to make 101, and an IPL record that includes Kolkata Knight Riders making 235 for 6.

Lucknow's other notable statistic is a coincidence but a striking one: in the five men's one-day internationals played here, the captain who won the toss has lost every time.

Scoring by format

Every number below is computed from Cricsheet's delivery records for Ekana rather than lifted from a summary table. First-innings means count only completed innings, so one rain-shortened fifty-over game is excluded from that column.

Format	Matches in archive	Span	Mean 1st innings	Median	Runs per over	Runs per wicket
ODI (men)	5	Oct 2022 – Oct 2023	253	245	5.10	29.3
T20I (men)	3	Nov 2018 – Jan 2023	164	195	6.84	27.6
IPL	29	Apr 2023 – May 2026	175	171	8.46	28.1

No Test has been played here. The T20 international median of 195 above a mean of 164 is a sampling artefact of three matches — two India innings of 199 and 195, and one of 101 in a chase — and should not be read as a par score.

The fifty-over row is more useful. Runs per wicket of 29.3 and a dot-ball rate of 52.6 per cent put Lucknow at the harder-work end of Indian one-day grounds, and the boundary rate of 8.9 per cent of deliveries is the lowest of the ten venues here in that format.

The five men's ODIs, match by match

With a sample this small, the individual scorecards say more than any average.

Match	First innings	Second innings	Result
Oct 2022	South Africa 249 for 4	India 240 for 8	South Africa won by 9 runs
Oct 2023	South Africa 311 for 7	Australia 177	South Africa won
Oct 2023	Sri Lanka 209	Australia 215 for 5	Australia won
Oct 2023	Netherlands 262	Sri Lanka 263 for 5	Sri Lanka won
Oct 2023	India 229 for 9	England 129	India won

South Africa's 311 for 7 in October 2023, with Quinton de Kock making 109, is the highest total the ground has seen in the format, and Australia's reply of 177 the most emphatic collapse. India's 229 for 9 against England looked modest until England were bowled out for 129, which is the pattern worth noticing: a target here has repeatedly been harder to reach than the scoreboard suggested. Two of the five chases succeeded.

Five women's one-day internationals were also played here in March 2021, between India and South Africa, and every one of the five was won by the side batting second — a clean sweep for the chase that the men's record does not replicate. The wider story of the women's game in the country is covered in the history of India's women's cricket.

Four IPL seasons

Season	Matches	Mean 1st innings
2023	7	148
2024	7	183
2025	8	193
2026	7	173

The first season is the outlier and it is the one that built the ground's reputation. A mean of 148 across seven matches in 2023 is genuinely low for a modern IPL venue, and Lucknow Super Giants were themselves bowled out for 108 here in May that year. From 2024 the figure jumped by 35 runs and has not returned; the 2026 mean of 173 sits close to the tournament norm.

Band	IPL first innings
Under 120	0
120–149	6
150–179	11
180–209	9
210 or more	3

Not one completed first innings at the ground has finished below 120, which is unusual, and only three have passed 210. The distribution is tight around the middle: Lucknow is a ground where the first innings is very likely to land between 150 and 210 and where extremes in either direction have been rare.

Pace against spin, and how spin is used

Bowler-credited dismissals only — caught, bowled, lbw, stumped, hit wicket. A handful of part-time bowlers resist classification as pace or spin, and their overs sit outside these shares.

Format	Pace wickets	Spin wickets	Spin share of overs	Pace average	Spin average	Pace economy	Spin economy
ODI (men)	48	23	37%	29.2	34.3	5.32	4.98
T20I (men)	17	10	37%	34.8	25.5	7.79	5.80
IPL	214	107	37%	29.2	30.5	9.11	8.08

The spin share is 37 per cent in all three formats, which no other ground in this survey manages, and it is among the highest white-ball spin usage of the ten. Ravi Bishnoi's 20 IPL wickets are the most at the venue by any bowler, and Krunal Pandya's 13 are third. That is a spin-led home attack playing on a square designed to accommodate one.

The returns are more equivocal than the usage. Spin has been the cheaper option by economy in every format — strikingly so in T20 internationals, at 5.80 an over against pace's 7.79 — but its wicket average is worse than pace in both fifty-over cricket and the IPL. Pace has produced all four five-wicket hauls in the tournament archive here: Mark Wood in April 2023, Yash Thakur in April 2024, Hardik Pandya in April 2025 and Mohsin Khan in April 2026.

Phase	IPL runs per over	IPL balls per wicket
Overs 1–6	8.33	25.8
Overs 7–15	7.98	22.4
Overs 16–20	9.61	12.9

The middle-overs figure of 22.4 balls per wicket is the most wicket-prone middle phase of any ground in this survey with more than twenty IPL matches behind it. It is consistent with a square that offers grip: the middle overs at Lucknow are more dangerous than the powerplay, which is the reverse of the usual twenty-over shape, even though spinners here are not cheap per wicket overall.

Toss and result

Format	Chose to bat	Chose to field	Toss-winner won	Bat-first side won
ODI (men)	2	3	0 of 5	3 of 5
T20I (men)	1	2	0 of 3	2 of 3
IPL	6	23	18 of 27	11 of 27

The international rows are a curiosity: eight men's internationals, eight losses for the side that won the toss. That is a coincidence of small numbers rather than a property of the ground, and the IPL column shows what happens with a real sample — toss-winners have won eighteen of twenty-seven decided matches, and chasing sides sixteen.

Twenty-three of twenty-nine IPL captains have fielded first, and the chase record justifies it: sixteen wins to eleven. The largest total run down is Royal Challengers Bengaluru's 230 for 4 in May 2025, chasing Lucknow's 227 for 3 with eight balls to spare. The smallest total successfully defended is Royal Challengers Bangalore's 126 for 9 in May 2023, when Lucknow were dismissed for 108 in reply.

Season, weather and the practical caveats

Lucknow's international fixtures have fallen in October and November and its IPL matches between late March and May, which means the ground has never staged a match in the cold heart of the northern winter or in the monsoon. October evenings here are warm and increasingly humid as the night goes on, and dew has been a factor in the World Cup matches; April and May are hot and dry, with a fast outfield.

The ground's youth is the biggest caveat on this page. It has staged eight men's internationals and twenty-nine IPL matches in total, which is fewer matches than the Arun Jaitley Stadium in Delhi has hosted IPL games alone. Averages built on that base move quickly, and the 35-run jump between the 2023 and 2024 IPL seasons is a good illustration of how much a change in preparation can shift them. The range of surfaces available across the country is set out in Indian pitch types and conditions, and the calendar that governs when they are used in the monsoon and the cricket season.

Four things the numbers say

• Two soils means two pitches, and the data reflects it. A ground that produces both a 99 all out in a T20 international and a 235 for 6 in the IPL is not one surface being read differently; it is different strips being prepared for different purposes.
• Spin bowls more here than anywhere else in this survey and does not take wickets more cheaply. Thirty-seven per cent of white-ball overs and a worse average than pace in two of three formats is a genuine tension in how the venue is used.
• The middle overs are where a twenty-over innings dies. A wicket every 22.4 balls between overs seven and fifteen is the most dangerous middle phase of any well-used ground in this set.
• The 2023 IPL average is not the ground's identity. One season at 148, three at 173 or higher. Anyone still calling Lucknow a low-scoring venue is quoting the first year of a four-year record.

Ranked lists of the biggest totals, best individual performances and leading aggregates at the ground are on the Ekana Cricket Stadium records page. For the venue's place among India's grounds see India's iconic cricket stadiums, and for the national picture, cricket in India.

Sources and method

All scoring, toss, phase and bowler-type figures on this page are computed from the Cricsheet ball-by-ball archive (cricsheet.org, ODC-BY 1.0) as read in August 2026. The archive holds five men's ODIs at this ground from October 2022, three men's T20 internationals from November 2018 and twenty-nine IPL matches from April 2023. Counts are counts within that archive rather than a complete fixture history, and no Test has been played at the venue.

Women's internationals at the ground — five ODIs and three T20 internationals between India and South Africa in March 2021 — are excluded from every table so that the men's format averages are not blended with a different scoring context. The women's chase record noted above is stated separately for that reason.

Means, medians, bands, phase splits and toss outcomes are computed from the deliveries themselves rather than quoted. Wickets are credited to a bowler only for the dismissal types a bowler earns, 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 description of the square — nine pitches laid on a mixture of local black soil and imported red soil, with the red strips offering more pace and bounce and the black more grip — comes from published Uttar Pradesh Cricket Association and venue information and is descriptive, not computed: no attempt is made here to attribute individual matches to a particular strip, because the archive does not record which one was used. The stadium's seating of roughly 50,000 is likewise descriptive and used in no calculation.