Ekana Cricket Stadium Records & Stats | Lucknow Cricket
Written and checked by CricketTakenPublished Cricket in India9 min read
Ekana is the newest major ground in this set and its international record is correspondingly thin. Opened in 2017 in the Gomti Nagar Extension of Lucknow, formally the Bharat Ratna Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee Cricket Stadium, it seats 50,100 — more than any other venue covered here — and is reported to have the longest straight boundaries in the country. Its first international was a Twenty20 match on 6 November 2018, and in the eight years since it has staged one Test, a short run of one-day internationals and three T20 internationals.
The single most quoted innings played here is Rohit Sharma's 111 not out in that first fixture, against West Indies. It made him the first player to score four Twenty20 international centuries. The most consequential match was on 29 October 2023, when India defended 229 for 9 against England in a World Cup group game and bowled them out for 129, a hundred-run win in a tournament India went on to reach the final of.
Everything ranked below is computed from ball-by-ball scoring, and for this ground the gaps matter more than usual. The archive holds five men's one-day internationals, three men's Twenty20 internationals and 29 IPL matches. It holds no Tests at all, because the ground's only Test involved Afghanistan and the publisher withholds those fixtures — as it does the three-match one-day series that opened the venue's fifty-over history in November 2019.
The ledger, format by format
| Format | Matches counted | Window | India played | India W-L | Highest total | Lowest all out |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Test | 0 counted, 1 all-time | Nov 2019 | none | — | — | — |
| ODI | 5 | Oct 2022 – Oct 2023 | 2 | 1-1 | South Africa 311-7 v Australia, 2023 | England 129, 2023 |
| T20I | 3 | Nov 2018 – Jan 2023 | 3 | 3-0 | India 199-2 v Sri Lanka, 2022 | none, no side dismissed |
| IPL | 29 | 2023 – 2026 | — | — | Kolkata Knight Riders 235-6, 2024 | Lucknow Super Giants 108, 2023 |
One number in the one-day column is worth pausing on: the side winning the toss has lost all five matches. On a five-match sample that is a coincidence rather than a finding, but it is the sort of coincidence that gets repeated as a fact about a venue, so it is better stated with its sample size attached.
The one Test, and why it is not in the tables
Ekana staged a Test from 27 to 29 November 2019, between Afghanistan and West Indies, and West Indies won it inside three days. Afghanistan had adopted Lucknow as a neutral home venue in that period, and the ground also held their one-day and Twenty20 series against West Indies that month.
None of those matches appear in the tables on this page, and the reason is a publisher policy rather than an oversight: the ball-by-ball archive this page is built on excludes all Afghanistan men's fixtures. Their absence is why the Test row above reads zero and why the venue's one-day international total is five here rather than eight or nine. It is better to name the gap than to quietly report a partial figure as a complete one. The grounds that carry India's own red-ball fixtures are set out in the Test cricket grounds guide.
Five one-day internationals, four of them from one World Cup
| ODI totals at the ground | Score | Opponent | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | South Africa 311-7 | Australia | 12 Oct 2023 |
| 2 | Sri Lanka 263-5 | Netherlands | 21 Oct 2023 |
| 3 | Netherlands 262 | Sri Lanka | 21 Oct 2023 |
| 4 | South Africa 249-4 | India | 6 Oct 2022 |
| 5 | India 240-8 | South Africa | 6 Oct 2022 |
The 2022 match was reduced to forty overs a side by rain, which is why it does not enter the first-innings averages: across the four full-length first innings the mean is 253 and the median 245. Only one innings at the ground has passed 300.
Quinton de Kock has more one-day runs here than anyone, 157, including 109 in South Africa's 311 for 7 against Australia — a match Australia lost by 134 runs after being bowled out for 177. Dilshan Madushanka leads the bowling with seven wickets from two matches. India's two fifty-over games here split: a nine-run defeat to South Africa in October 2022 and the England win a year later. The broader fifty-over record is set out in the history of ODI cricket in India.
29 October 2023: India 229, England 129
India's 2023 World Cup match at Lucknow is the one fixture at this ground that mattered to a tournament. India made 229 for 9 — a modest total on a slow surface — and England were bowled out for 129. It was India's sixth win from six matches in that tournament, and it sits inside the run traced in the India World Cup history and the India-England rivalry.
The four World Cup matches here produced eight innings totals: 311 and 177, then 209 and 215, then 262 and 263, then 229 and 129. A range from 129 to 311 on the same square inside seventeen days is why single-venue pitch-character claims are worth treating carefully at grounds this new.
Three Twenty20 internationals, all won by India
The T20 international record here is three matches, and the scoring across them is strikingly low: 6.84 runs an over over all six innings, with 11.7 per cent of balls hit for four or six. Powerplay scoring runs at 6.24 an over and middle-over scoring at 6.11.
- 6 November 2018 v West Indies: India 195 for 2, Rohit Sharma 111 not out, West Indies 124 for 9. India won by 71 runs.
- 24 February 2022 v Sri Lanka: India 199 for 2, Sri Lanka 137 for 6. India won by 62 runs.
- 29 January 2023 v New Zealand: New Zealand 99 for 8, India 101 for 4. India won by six wickets.
That third match, in which neither side reached 105, is the lowest-scoring of the three, and Bhuvneshwar Kumar's four wickets across the set is the leading bowling aggregate at the ground. The format's Indian arc is covered in the T20 international history.
Lucknow Super Giants: 29 matches in four seasons
Ekana became an IPL home ground in 2023, and the Lucknow Super Giants have played almost all of the 29 matches held here.
| Leading IPL aggregates at the ground | Figure |
|---|---|
| Runs — Mitchell Marsh | 571 |
| Runs — KL Rahul | 540 |
| Runs — Nicholas Pooran | 539 |
| Wickets — Ravi Bishnoi | 20 |
| Wickets — Mohsin Khan | 14 |
| Wickets — Krunal Pandya | 13 |
- The first innings averages 175 across all 29 matches with a median of 171. Season by season: 148 in 2023, 183 in 2024, 193 in 2025, 173 in 2026.
- Three first innings have passed 210 and six have fallen below 150. Nothing has fallen below 121.
- Sides batting first have won 11 of 27 decided matches, and the toss-winner has won 18 of 27 — a much stronger toss effect than the venue's one-day record shows, and 23 of the 29 captains chose to field.
- Four bowlers have taken five in an innings: Mark Wood in the ground's first IPL match on 1 April 2023, Yash Thakur in 2024, Hardik Pandya in 2025 and Mohsin Khan in 2026.
- Rishabh Pant's 118 against Royal Challengers Bengaluru in May 2025 is the highest individual score at the ground in the competition; the highest total is Kolkata Knight Riders' 235 for 6 in May 2024.
- Lucknow Super Giants have made four of the five lowest totals at their own ground, from 108 in May 2023 to 141 in April 2026.
Do the long boundaries show up in the data?
Ekana's straight boundaries are the thing the ground is best known for, and the claim is easy enough to test against the Twenty20 sample. Across the 29 IPL matches played here, 5.78 per cent of deliveries have been hit for six and 12.04 per cent for four, which works out at just under seven sixes an innings.
| IPL ground | Balls | Six rate | Four rate | Sixes per innings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ekana, Lucknow | 6,904 | 5.78% | 12.04% | 6.9 |
| Dharamsala | 4,461 | 7.02% | 14.12% | 8.2 |
| Arun Jaitley, Delhi | 24,566 | 5.70% | 12.23% | 6.7 |
| Sawai Mansingh, Jaipur | 16,174 | 4.52% | 12.53% | 5.4 |
The answer is that the boundary length does not obviously suppress six-hitting. Lucknow's six rate is fractionally higher than Delhi's and well above Jaipur's, and its four rate is the lowest of the four. If anything the data suggests a ground where batters convert into the gaps rather than over the rope, which is a different claim from the one the boundary measurement invites — and on 29 matches it is a tendency rather than a fact.
India's five matches at the ground
India have played three Twenty20 internationals and two one-day internationals at Ekana, and no Test. The Twenty20 record is 3-0, the fifty-over record 1-1. Across those five matches Rohit Sharma is India's leading scorer at the ground with 155 in the short format and 87 in the long, and Bhuvneshwar Kumar and Kuldeep Yadav lead the bowling.
That is a slighter body of home cricket than most Indian venues accumulate in their first eight years, and the reason is scheduling rather than performance: Lucknow was allotted a neutral-venue role for Afghanistan in 2019 and a World Cup group in 2023, both of which filled dates that would otherwise have gone to bilateral series. The Lucknow Super Giants franchise arriving in 2022 gave the ground a guaranteed annual block of Twenty20 cricket, and that is now where most of its match record comes from.
What a new ground's numbers can and cannot tell you
- The international sample is too small for venue averages, and the IPL sample is not. Eight internationals against 29 Twenty20 league matches means the reliable numbers here are all franchise numbers.
- The IPL scoring has risen and then fallen back. From 148 in 2023 to 193 in 2025 and down to 173 in 2026, which is a squarer that has been re-laid and re-learned rather than a fixed pitch character.
- India have not lost a Twenty20 international here and have played only three. Both facts belong in the same sentence.
- The withheld Afghanistan fixtures are a real part of the ground's history. A Test, an ODI series and a Twenty20 series that the data cannot see still happened here, and the venue's international total is larger than any table on this page.
Sources and method
The tables and splits here are computed from Cricsheet's ball-by-ball match archive, published under the Open Data Commons Attribution Licence. For this ground the archive holds five men's one-day internationals, three men's Twenty20 internationals and 29 IPL matches, and nothing else. Cricsheet withholds all matches involving the Afghanistan men's team, which removes the ground's only Test and its first one-day internationals from every count above; those fixtures are described in prose instead and are excluded from every average, ranking and win-loss line.
Wickets are credited only where a scorer attributes the dismissal to a bowler, so run-outs fall outside the bowling figures. The opening year, seating capacity, official stadium name and the boundary-length claim come from the venue's own published information rather than from match data. Figures were checked in August 2026 and the IPL rows move with each season. For wider context, see the survey of India's iconic cricket stadiums, the companion Lucknow pitch and scoring report, the Greenfield record for another recently built venue, and the cricket in India hub.