HPCA Stadium Pitch Report & Average Scores | Dharamsala

Of the Indian grounds with a meaningful Indian Premier League sample, Dharamsala scores fastest. The eighteen completed first innings in the archive average 195, the tournament run rate at the ground is 8.93 an over, and 21.1 per cent of all deliveries have gone for four or six. Each of those is the highest figure of the ten venues examined in this set, and the death-overs rate of 11.24 runs an over is more than half a run clear of the next ground on the list.

The obvious explanation is the altitude. The Himachal Pradesh Cricket Association Stadium sits at roughly 1,450 metres in the Kangra valley, under the Dhauladhar range, and thinner air means a struck ball carries further. That is a real effect and it shows up exactly where you would expect: in the boundary count and at the death, when batters are hitting through the line rather than working the ball around.

What the altitude does not explain is the Test record, where the ground has behaved like nowhere else in India. Two Tests have been played here, in March 2017 and March 2024, and in both the side batting second dominated: first innings have produced 25.9 runs per wicket, second innings 40.5, third innings 16.6. India won both, and neither lasted five days.

Scoring by format

Dharamsala's scoring figures are worked out from Cricsheet's ball-by-ball archive for the venue. First-innings means count only completed innings — all out, or the full quota of overs — so one rain-shortened one-day game and two shortened T20 internationals are excluded from those columns.

Format	Matches in archive	Span	Mean 1st innings	Median	Runs per over	Runs per wicket
Test (men)	2	Mar 2017 – Mar 2024	259	259	3.42	28.5
ODI (men)	8	Jan 2013 – Oct 2023	269	273	5.50	31.4
T20I (men)	10	Oct 2015 – Dec 2025	159	153	7.91	24.6
IPL	19	Apr 2010 – May 2026	195	195	8.93	29.6

The T20 international row is the one that undercuts the altitude story, and it deserves attention. Ten men's T20 internationals here have averaged 159 in the first innings — the second-lowest figure of any ground in this survey — because six of them were 2016 World T20 qualifying matches between associate sides, and one was a December 2025 game in which South Africa were bowled out for 117. The ball carries the same distance for Oman as it does for Royal Challengers Bengaluru; the difference is who is hitting it.

The two Tests, and why they look so strange

Innings of the match	Runs	Wickets	Runs per wicket
First	518	20	25.9
Second	809	20	40.5
Third	332	20	16.6
Fourth	106	2	53.0

Both visiting captains won the toss and batted, and both lost. In March 2017 Australia made 300 and 137 and India 332 and 106 for 2, India winning by eight wickets to take the series. In March 2024 England made 218 and 195, India 477, and India won by an innings and 64 runs.

The second-innings figure of 40.5 runs per wicket against a third-innings figure of 16.6 is the sharpest collapse across consecutive innings at any ground in this survey. The pitch here does not so much wear as suddenly stop being usable: in the 2024 Test, Ravichandran Ashwin took five wickets, Kuldeep Yadav five, and England's third innings lasted 195 runs. Shoaib Bashir also took five in India's innings, which is why the aggregate rewards spin on both sides rather than only the home attack.

With two matches, none of this is a law. It is, though, a consistent two-match pattern, and it is the opposite of the Delhi or Mohali profile where the first innings is the most productive.

Pace against spin

Bowler-credited dismissals only. Occasional bowlers who could not be classified with confidence are excluded from the shares rather than assigned a type.

Format	Pace wickets	Spin wickets	Spin share of overs	Pace average	Spin average	Pace economy	Spin economy
Test (men)	18	42	59%	41.7	22.9	3.52	3.19
ODI (men)	85	37	33%	31.8	33.3	5.69	5.30
T20I (men)	64	29	21%	30.8	16.2	8.00	7.03
IPL	159	50	24%	30.3	28.5	9.36	8.42

The Test spin average of 22.9 is the lowest red-ball figure at any ground in this survey. Ashwin has 13 wickets in two matches here and Kuldeep Yadav 11 — extraordinary rates for a venue with a reputation built on carry and bounce. The wider place of that skill in Indian cricket is set out in the guide to India's spin bowling tradition.

In the shorter formats spin is used sparingly — 21 per cent of the overs in T20 internationals and 24 per cent in the IPL, the two lowest shares in this survey — and yet it is markedly cheaper per wicket than pace in both. That combination is the strongest practical finding on this page: captains at Dharamsala have under-bowled their spinners relative to what the numbers reward, most likely because the altitude makes the ground feel like a seamer's.

Fifty-over cricket: eight matches, eight identical toss calls

In all eight men's one-day internationals at this ground the captain who won the toss chose to field. Not one has batted. The results split four-four.

Match	First innings	Second innings	Result
Jan 2013	India 226	England 227 for 3	England won
Oct 2014	India 330 for 6	West Indies 271	India won
Oct 2016	New Zealand 190	India 194 for 4	India won
Dec 2017	India 112	Sri Lanka 114 for 3	Sri Lanka won
Oct 2023	England 364 for 9	Bangladesh 227	England won
Oct 2023	Netherlands 245 for 8	South Africa 207	Netherlands won by 38 runs
Oct 2023	New Zealand 273	India 274 for 6	India won
Oct 2023	Australia 388	New Zealand 383 for 9	Australia won

The last of those, on 28 October 2023, produced 771 runs across the two innings and is the highest-scoring day the ground has seen in any format. The December 2017 match is its other extreme: India were bowled out for 112 on a green, seaming surface prepared late in the year and Sri Lanka needed only 20.4 overs to knock off the target. Both scorecards came off the same square inside six years, which is a caution against reading the 2023 World Cup figures as a permanent property of the venue.

No first-innings total below 245 has ever been successfully defended here in a one-day international, and none above 273 has ever been chased down. India's home fifty-over record and the venues that shaped it are covered in the history of ODI cricket in India.

The IPL record: bat first, then defend

Format	Chose to bat	Chose to field	Bat-first side won	Chasing side won
Test (men)	2	0	0	2
ODI (men)	0	8	4	4
T20I (men)	3	7	4	5
IPL	2	17	11	7

Seventeen of nineteen IPL captains have fielded first, and eleven of the eighteen decided matches went to the side batting first anyway. That is the reverse of the pattern at the Sawai Mansingh Stadium in Jaipur, and it is the practical consequence of a high-scoring ground where a big first innings is genuinely hard to catch. Royal Challengers Bengaluru's 254 for 5 in May 2026 was defended by 92 runs; Punjab's 236 for 5 in May 2025 and Kings XI Punjab's 232 for 2 in May 2011 were both defended too. The largest successful chase in the archive is Delhi Capitals' 216 for 7 in May 2026.

Season	Matches	Mean 1st innings
2010	2	183
2011	3	200
2012	2	130
2013	2	177
2023	2	200
2024	2	204
2025	1	236
2026	4	222

No season here has more than four matches, so the annual figures are illustrative rather than a trend. The useful summary is that seven of eighteen first innings have passed 210 and none has fallen below 120, which no other ground in this survey can say.

Phase	IPL runs per over	IPL balls per wicket
Overs 1–6	7.88	24.8
Overs 7–15	8.47	23.2
Overs 16–20	11.24	12.9

The middle overs go faster than the powerplay, which happens at almost no other Indian venue. That is the altitude effect in its clearest form: batters who would normally rotate strike between overs seven and fifteen can hit boundaries instead, because the outfield is quick and the ball travels.

Weather, season and the practical caveats

Dharamsala's fixtures are squeezed into two narrow windows and both carry risk. The March slot, used for both Tests, brings cold mornings, low cloud off the Dhauladhar and enough moisture in the surface for the new ball to do something for an hour. The October-to-December slot, used for most one-day and T20 internationals, is drier but can turn sharply cold; the December 2017 ODI in which India made 112 was played in conditions closer to an English April than an Indian one.

IPL matches in April and May are the ground at its most benign: warm afternoons, hard outfield, no dew worth mentioning at this elevation. Rain and low light are the recurring interruptions rather than heat, and the ground's drainage has improved but its sightscreens sit against a mountain backdrop that shortens the usable evening. The way the Indian calendar accommodates this sort of regional variation is set out in the guide to the monsoon and the cricket season, and the range of surfaces across the country in Indian pitch types and conditions.

Five conclusions from the data

• The altitude effect is real, measurable and confined to boundary-hitting. It raises the run rate and the boundary percentage; it does not raise the number of runs per wicket, which at 29.6 in the IPL is unremarkable.
• Spin is under-used here relative to its returns. It bowls the smallest share of white-ball overs of any ground in this survey and takes wickets more cheaply than pace in three of the four formats.
• The Test pattern inverts the Indian norm. Batting second has been worth 40.5 runs a wicket, batting first 25.9. Two matches is a small sample, but the direction was the same in both.
• The T20 international average is a sampling artefact. A mean of 159 reflects a 2016 qualifying tournament between associate nations, not a slow pitch.
• Nothing here has been defended below 246 in fifty-over cricket. If you are setting a target at Dharamsala, the historical floor is high.

Ranked lists of team totals, individual scores and bowling returns at the ground are on the HPCA Stadium records page. The venue's standing among the country's grounds is covered in India's iconic cricket stadiums and the wider picture at cricket in India.

Sources and method

Scoring, toss, phase and bowler-type figures here all come out of the Cricsheet ball-by-ball archive (cricsheet.org, ODC-BY 1.0) as read in August 2026. The archive holds two men's Tests at this ground from March 2017, eight men's ODIs from January 2013, ten men's T20 internationals from October 2015 and nineteen IPL matches from April 2010. Counts are counts within that archive, not a complete fixture history of the venue.

Two women's T20 internationals played here during the 2016 World T20 are excluded from every table so that the men's averages are not blended with a different scoring context. Rain-affected innings are excluded from first-innings means but included in aggregate run-rate, wicket and phase totals, which is why the two sets of numbers describe slightly different match samples.

Nothing in this section is quoted second-hand: the averages, medians, rates, toss outcomes and phase splits are all computed from the deliveries. 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; classifying bowlers by type is an editorial judgement made by name, with the unclassifiable omitted rather than guessed.

The stadium's elevation of roughly 1,450 metres, its seating of about 23,000 and its March 2017 first Test come from Himachal Pradesh Cricket Association and ESPNcricinfo ground information; published elevation figures vary by a few tens of metres depending on the reference point, so a rounded figure is used and no calculation on this page depends on it. The attribution of the boundary and run-rate figures to altitude is an interpretation of the pattern in the data, not a measured aerodynamic result.