Green Park Pitch Report & Average Scores | Kanpur

Green Park has hosted Test cricket since January 1952 and it still behaves like an old ground rather than a modern one. Across the six men's Tests in the ball-by-ball era at Kanpur, the game has moved at 3.12 runs an over with a wicket falling every 62 balls, and spin has bowled 64 per cent of the deliveries. Neither number describes a raging turner. They describe a slow, low surface where attrition is the default and where a first innings of 350 is worth more than the same score would be at Ahmedabad or Bengaluru.

The mean first innings in those six Tests is 385, inflated by India's 642 against Sri Lanka in November 2009. The median of 332 is the more useful figure, and the lowest first innings of the set is Bangladesh's 233 in September 2024. In the fifty-over game the pattern is different again: six men's one-day internationals between 2005 and 2017 produced a mean first innings of 281 and 42.6 runs per wicket, the sort of numbers that come from a flat pitch and short straight boundaries rather than from a bowler's ground.

What has changed at Kanpur is not the square. It is the outfield. In September 2024 the venue lost two full days to a wet ground with barely any rain falling in playing hours on the third, the ICC rated the outfield unsatisfactory and issued the venue a demerit point, and the Uttar Pradesh Cricket Association's arrangement with the state government — which owns the stadium — came under public scrutiny. Any honest pitch report for this ground has to treat drainage as a first-order variable, not a footnote.

Scoring by format at Kanpur

Figures below are derived from the Cricsheet delivery-level files for this ground. Boundary share means the percentage of all runs scored in fours and sixes.

Format	Matches in archive	Span	Mean 1st innings	Median	Runs per over	Runs per wicket	Boundary share
Test (men)	6	Nov 2004 – Sep 2024	385	332	3.12	32.2	51%
ODI (men)	6	Apr 2005 – Oct 2017	281	278	5.71	42.6	49%
T20I (men)	1	Jan 2017	147	—	7.73	29.5	45%
IPL	4	May 2016 – May 2017	161	163	8.74	26.5	63%

The gap between the Test runs-per-wicket figure of 32.2 and the one-day figure of 42.6 is the single most telling contrast on this page. A ground that gives up a wicket every 32 runs over five days and every 43 runs over fifty overs is not a green seamer that has been tamed; it is a slow pitch whose difficulty comes from time and wear rather than from anything the ball does off the seam on day one.

The Test record, match by match

Six matches is a small enough set that the individual scorecards say more than the mean.

Date	Match	Innings	Result
Nov 2004	South Africa v India	SA 510-9 dec; India 466; SA 169-4	Drawn
Apr 2008	India v South Africa	SA 265; India 325; SA 121; India 64-2	India won by 8 wickets
Nov 2009	India v Sri Lanka	India 642; SL 229; SL 269	India won by an innings and 144 runs
Sep 2016	India v New Zealand	India 318; NZ 262; India 377-5; NZ 236	India won by 197 runs
Nov 2021	India v New Zealand	India 345; NZ 296; India 234-7 dec; NZ 165-9	Drawn
Sep 2024	Bangladesh v India	Bangladesh 233; India 285-9 dec; Bangladesh 146; India 98-3	India won by 7 wickets

Four wins and two draws, and the two draws are the interesting entries. The November 2021 match ended with New Zealand nine down and India one wicket short of a result after Rachin Ravindra and Ajaz Patel survived the closing overs. The November 2004 draw is the only one of the six in which a side batting first passed 500, and it still ended without a result because a second innings of 466 took India most of two days.

The September 2016 fixture was India's 500th men's Test. Ravichandran Ashwin took ten wickets in the match and Ravindra Jadeja finished with six wickets and 92 runs across two undismissed innings; India won by 197 runs. The broader arc of Indian red-ball cricket that this venue has been part of since 1952 is covered in the guide to Test cricket in India, and the ground sits alongside Chepauk, the Wankhede and Eden Gardens among India's original Test venues.

The most extreme scorecard in the set is the last one. With two days lost to a wet outfield, India declared on 285 for 9 in 34.4 overs, reaching 50 in three overs, 100 in 10.1 and 200 in 24.2 — each of those the fastest a Test team had managed to that point — and still won inside the remaining time. That match tells you almost nothing about the pitch and everything about a side deciding that the only route to a result was to stop treating the format's clock as fixed.

Spin bowls most of the overs without out-bowling seam

Format	Pace wickets	Spin wickets	Spin share of overs	Pace average	Spin average	Pace economy	Spin economy
Test (men)	68	117	64%	33.1	30.6	3.18	2.90
ODI (men)	43	30	43%	44.3	44.0	5.86	5.31
IPL	36	7	26%	25.9	49.0	8.52	8.76

The Test row is the one worth sitting with. Spin bowls nearly two-thirds of the overs and takes nearly two-thirds of the wickets, which is what you would expect at an Indian venue. But the strike rates are almost identical — a wicket every 62.5 balls for pace, every 63.3 for spin — and the averages are separated by two and a half runs. Kanpur is a ground where captains bowl spin because it is cheap and because the pitch rewards patience, not because it produces the sharp collapses associated with Chennai or Nagpur. The way that preference developed across Indian conditions generally is set out in India's spin bowling tradition.

Ashwin has 21 wickets at the ground in the archive, Harbhajan Singh 16 and Jadeja 15, at averages of 20.8, 25.9 and 19.3 respectively. Among quick bowlers the standout return is Jasprit Bumrah's six wickets at 11.2 from 168 balls in the 2024 Test, taken on a surface that had been under covers for the better part of three days.

The IPL row runs the other way and should be read with the sample size in mind: four matches, 26 per cent of the overs bowled by spin, and spin averaging 49. That is one bad night from being reversed.

The fifty-over shape: a dead middle, then a scramble

Phase	Runs per over	Balls per wicket
Overs 1–10	5.72	51.4
Overs 11–40	5.12	74.5
Overs 41–50	7.94	16.6

A wicket every 74.5 balls through the middle thirty overs works out to one dismissal roughly every twelve and a half overs. That is the flattest middle phase of the three phases here by a wide margin, and it explains why five of the six one-day internationals at the ground produced a first innings of at least 249. The last ten overs then invert everything: nearly eight an over, a wicket every 16.6 balls, and in two of the six matches a finish decided by single figures.

Date	Match	First innings	Second innings	Result
Apr 2005	India v Pakistan	India 249-6	Pakistan 252-5	Pakistan won by 5 wickets
Nov 2007	India v Pakistan	India 294-6	Pakistan 248	India won by 46 runs
Nov 2008	India v England	England 240	India 198-5	India won by 16 runs, rain-shortened
Nov 2013	India v West Indies	West Indies 263-5	India 266-5	India won by 5 wickets
Oct 2015	India v South Africa	South Africa 303-5	India 298-7	South Africa won by 5 runs
Oct 2017	India v New Zealand	India 337-6	New Zealand 331-7	India won by 6 runs

Three wins batting first, three chasing, and three of the six settled by fewer than twenty runs. The toss split three-three as well, which is unusual: across the venues in this survey the toss-winner almost always fields. Kanpur is one of the few Indian grounds where batting first in a fifty-over match has been a genuinely defensible choice, and Rohit Sharma's 329 runs at the ground — the most by any batter in the archive here — were made largely in first innings. The wider fifty-over context is in the guide to ODI cricket in India.

Four IPL nights, four chases

Gujarat Lions used Green Park as a second home in 2016 and 2017, and the four matches went the same way each time: the toss-winner fielded, and the side batting second won. Chases of 125, 173, 196 and 158 were all completed, two of them with more than a full over to spare.

The phase profile from those four games shows an unusually productive powerplay at 9.17 an over against 8.14 in the middle overs, which is the opposite of the usual Indian twenty-over shape. Four matches is not a trend, and the venue has not staged a tournament fixture since May 2017. For a working comparison inside the same state, the Ekana Stadium pitch report covers the ground that has taken over Uttar Pradesh's international and franchise cricket.

Rain, dew and the drainage question

Kanpur sits on the Ganga plain in Civil Lines with the river immediately behind the ground, and its international fixtures cluster into two windows: late September to November, and January to February. The first window is the tail of the retreating monsoon, and it is where the venue's problems have surfaced.

The 2024 Test is the clearest case. Play was possible for only 35 overs across the first three days. Day two went to rain; day three went to a wet outfield under sunshine, which is a drainage failure rather than a weather event. The ICC's unsatisfactory rating and demerit point followed. The 2008 one-day international was also cut short by rain, and the 2021 Test lost time on the opening day.

None of that changes what the pitch does. It changes how much of the pitch you get to see, which for a five-day fixture is the same thing as changing the result. Anyone forecasting a Kanpur match in October should weight the outfield at least as heavily as the surface. The seasonal logic behind the whole Indian calendar is explained in the monsoon and the cricket season, and the range of surfaces prepared across the country in Indian pitch types and conditions.

Five readings from the numbers

• A wicket every 62 balls in Tests and every 43 runs in ODIs. Kanpur is slow rather than difficult. Time and wear do the work, not lateral movement.
• Spin bowls 64 per cent of Test overs and averages 30.6 against pace's 33.1. The strike rates are effectively level. This is a spinner's workload, not a spinner's paradise.
• Batting first is defensible here in fifty-over cricket. Three wins each way from six matches, with the toss split evenly — rare among Indian venues.
• Overs 11 to 40 concede 5.12 with a wicket every 74.5 balls. If a chasing side is still eight down with wickets in hand at 40 overs, the last ten have gone at nearly eight.
• The outfield is the live risk, not the square. Two days lost to a wet ground in 2024 and an ICC demerit point make drainage the first thing to check before this venue's next fixture.

Ranked lists of the highest totals, individual innings and bowling returns at the ground are collected on the Green Park records page. For where Kanpur sits among the country's grounds see India's iconic cricket stadiums, and for everything else the hub at cricket in India.

Sources and method

The scoring means, medians, run rates, phase splits, toss counts and bowler-type shares on this page were calculated from the Cricsheet delivery-level archive (cricsheet.org, ODC-BY 1.0), read in August 2026. For this ground the archive holds six men's Tests from November 2004, six men's one-day internationals from April 2005, one men's T20 international from January 2017 and four Indian Premier League matches from 2016 and 2017. Green Park's fuller international history — 22 Tests from January 1952, 14 one-day internationals and one T20 international — extends well beyond that, so every count here is a count within the archive and not a complete fixture record. The 1952 first Test, India's first Test win over Australia at the ground in December 1959 and the earlier one-day internationals all predate ball-by-ball coverage and contribute nothing to the tables.

First-innings means use completed first innings only, including innings shortened by rain, which is why the November 2008 one-day international pulls the mean down. Wickets are credited to the bowler and only for caught, bowled, lbw, stumped, caught and bowled and hit wicket, so run-outs and other dismissals are absent from the pace and spin columns. Bowlers were sorted into pace or spin by name; a handful of occasional bowlers who could not be classified with confidence were dropped from those columns rather than assigned a guess, so the two rows need not sum to the format total.

Descriptive material is separate from the computed material and is not used in any calculation: the 1945 establishment date, the roughly 32,000 seating capacity, the state government's ownership with UPCA operating under a memorandum of understanding, and the ground's manually operated scoreboard come from venue and board information. The September 2024 washouts, the ICC's unsatisfactory outfield rating and its single demerit point, and the record-fast team milestones in India's 34.4-over first innings come from contemporaneous match reporting and ICC statements. The attribution of the 2024 lost days to drainage rather than rainfall follows the reporting from the ground and the fact that day three was abandoned without rain in playing hours; it is a reading of the evidence, not a measured quantity.