HPCA Stadium Records & Stats | Dharamsala Cricket Ground
Written and checked by CricketTakenPublished Cricket in India9 min read
The Himachal Pradesh Cricket Association's ground sits 1,457 metres above sea level with the Dhauladhar range behind the north stand, and it holds 21,200 people, one of the smallest capacities on the Test circuit anywhere. It opened in 2003, waited a decade for its first international, and took its first Test in March 2017. In the two Tests it has held, India have won both.
The most extraordinary match played here was not a Test. On 28 October 2023 Australia made 388 and New Zealand were bowled out for 383 chasing it, an aggregate of 771 runs in a World Cup group game that Australia won by five runs. That is comfortably the highest-scoring match the ground has seen in any format: 771 runs in a day, and the only occasion on which a side has passed 380 here and still lost.
The counts below come from ball-by-ball scoring: two men's Tests, eight men's one-day internationals, ten men's Twenty20 internationals and nineteen IPL matches. One 2023 World Cup fixture played here is missing from that archive because the publisher withholds Afghanistan men's matches, so the World Cup total for the ground was five, not four.
The ledger, format by format
| Format | Matches counted | Window | India played | India W-L | Highest total | Lowest all out |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Test | 2 | Mar 2017 – Mar 2024 | 2 | 2-0 | India 477 v England, 2024 | Australia 137, 2017 |
| ODI | 8 | Jan 2013 – Oct 2023 | 5 | 3-2 | Australia 388 v New Zealand, 2023 | India 112, 2017 |
| T20I | 10 | Oct 2015 – Dec 2025 | 4 | 3-1 | South Africa 200-3 v India, 2015 | South Africa 117, 2025 |
| IPL | 19 | 2010 – 2026 | — | — | Royal Challengers Bengaluru 254-5, 2026 | Kings XI Punjab 116, 2011 |
Six of the ten T20 internationals here had nothing to do with India: five were 2016 World T20 first-round matches between Bangladesh, Ireland, the Netherlands and Oman, and the sixth a Super 10 game between Australia and New Zealand. That block is why the ground's Twenty20 international averages read lower than its IPL figures.
Two Tests, two India wins, two milestones
| Test | Result | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| Mar 2017 v Australia | India won by 8 wickets | Kuldeep Yadav took four on debut; Australia 137 in the third innings |
| Mar 2024 v England | India won by an innings and 64 runs | Ravichandran Ashwin's hundredth Test; England 218 and 195 |
Both Tests were series deciders, and both were unusual for reasons beyond the result. The March 2017 match was Ajinkya Rahane's first as India's Test captain, with Virat Kohli unfit, and it settled a Border-Gavaskar series that had been level at 1-1 — an outcome traced in the Border-Gavaskar Trophy history. Steve Smith made 111 in Australia's first innings, Nathan Lyon took five, and Kuldeep Yadav was handed a debut on a ground nobody had a Test record at.
The March 2024 match was Ravichandran Ashwin's hundredth Test. He took five in England's first innings, Kuldeep Yadav five in the second, and India's 477 — with Shubman Gill 110 and Rohit Sharma 103 — was enough to win inside three days. Shoaib Bashir also took five for England, which makes Dharamsala a ground where four bowlers have taken a five-wicket haul in two matches.
The innings-by-innings pattern across those two Tests is unusually lopsided: 26 runs per wicket in the first innings of a match, 41 in the second, 17 in the third. Twenty wickets have fallen in each of the first three innings and only two in a fourth. On both occasions the side batting second scored heavily and the side batting third collapsed.
The 2023 World Cup fortnight, and the outfield
Dharamsala staged five matches at the 2023 World Cup, and the tournament brought the ground both its best day and its worst press. The best day was 28 October: Australia 388, Travis Head 109, Rachin Ravindra 116 in reply, New Zealand 383 all out with two balls left. India's own match here, on 22 October, was a 274 for 6 chase against New Zealand's 273, with Mohammed Shami taking five wickets in his first appearance of that tournament.
The worst press concerned the outfield, which several players and coaches criticised during the tournament as a genuine injury risk. It belongs in the venue's record rather than in a footnote: a ground at this altitude, with this much winter behind it, is harder to keep than one on the plains. The tournament as a whole is covered in the India World Cup history.
Fifty-over records: 388, 383 and 112
| Highest ODI totals | Score | Opponent | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Australia 388 | New Zealand | 28 Oct 2023 |
| 2 | New Zealand 383-9 | Australia | 28 Oct 2023 |
| 3 | England 364-9 | Bangladesh | 10 Oct 2023 |
| 4 | India 330-6 | West Indies | 17 Oct 2014 |
| 5 | India 274-6 | New Zealand | 22 Oct 2023 |
Three of the top five came inside three weeks of October 2023 and the fourth is the only India innings above 300 at the ground. The spread is extreme: two of the seven completed first innings in the window fell below 200 and two passed 350, with almost nothing in the middle.
India's 112 all out against Sri Lanka on 10 December 2017 is the lowest total the ground has produced, and it came in a match India lost by seven wickets in front of a cold Himachal crowd in mid-December. Virat Kohli leads the run-scorers here with 307, including 127 against West Indies in 2014, and Mohammed Shami leads the bowlers with eight. The wider fifty-over record is in the history of ODI cricket in India.
Ten Twenty20 internationals, six of them without India
The 2016 World T20 first round put five matches here in five days, between four sides ranked outside the top eight, and produced the strangest scorecard in the ground's book: on 13 March 2016 the Netherlands made 59 for 5 and Ireland 47 for 7 in a rain-shortened game the Netherlands won by twelve runs.
Of the four matches India have played, the first is still the highest-scoring. On 2 October 2015 India made 199 for 5 with Rohit Sharma reaching 106, and South Africa chased it down with 200 for 3 — the largest successful chase in a T20 international here, though not the ground's record: Delhi Capitals made 216 for 7 to beat Punjab Kings in May 2026. India then won three in a row: two against Sri Lanka in February 2022 and one against South Africa in December 2025, when South Africa were bowled out for 117 and India needed only 120. Tamim Iqbal's 233 runs at the ground, made in the 2016 first round, is still the highest aggregate by anyone in the format here. The format's Indian arc is set out in the T20 international history.
Nineteen IPL matches at 1,457 metres
Dharamsala has been a secondary home for Punjab Kings for most of its IPL history, and it is the highest-scoring Twenty20 ground of the ten venue records in this set.
- The first innings averages 195 across eighteen uninterrupted matches, with a median of 195 — twenty-six runs above the corresponding figure at Mohali.
- Seven of the eighteen first innings passed 210. None fell below 120.
- The scoring rate across the whole sample is 8.93 an over, with 21.1 per cent of balls hit for four or six.
- Death-over scoring runs at 11.24 an over, more than a run and a half above the equivalent figure at Mohali or Jaipur.
- Piyush Chawla took 13 wickets at the venue and Arshdeep Singh 10. Shaun Marsh made 334 runs and Adam Gilchrist 295, including a 106 in May 2011.
- The highest total is Royal Challengers Bengaluru's 254 for 5 in May 2026; the lowest is Kings XI Punjab's 116 in May 2011. The Punjab Kings have played most of the matches here.
Who has scored and taken the most here
| Leading aggregates by format | Runs | Wickets |
|---|---|---|
| Test | Steve Smith 128, KL Rahul 111, Joe Root 110, Shubman Gill 110 | Ravichandran Ashwin 13, Kuldeep Yadav 11, Ravindra Jadeja 6 |
| ODI | Virat Kohli 307, Rachin Ravindra 191, Daryl Mitchell 184 | Mohammed Shami 8, then five bowlers on 4 |
| T20I | Tamim Iqbal 233, Shreyas Iyer 147, Dasun Shanaka 121 | Paul van Meekeren 6, Shakib Al Hasan 6 |
| IPL | Shaun Marsh 334, Adam Gilchrist 295, Prabhsimran Singh 278 | Piyush Chawla 13, Arshdeep Singh 10 |
Every one of those aggregates is small by the standards of an established Indian venue, and that is the point: Dharamsala has hosted 39 senior matches in total across all four formats, fewer than Eden Gardens has hosted IPL games alone. Three of the four leading run-scorers in the list are overseas players, and the leading Twenty20 international wicket-taker here is a Dutchman, which is the signature of a ground whose international allocation has leaned towards neutral fixtures and tournament cricket rather than bilateral series.
The one exception is the Test list, where India's spinners dominate on a two-match sample. Ravichandran Ashwin and Kuldeep Yadav have 24 of the 62 Test wickets taken at the ground between them, and Kuldeep's eleven came in a debut and one later appearance seven years apart.
What the altitude does, and what it does not
- Twenty20 scoring at Dharamsala is genuinely high. An IPL first-innings average of 195 and a death rate of 11.24 an over are not accidents of a small sample; they hold across eight seasons spread over sixteen years.
- Red-ball cricket here has not been high-scoring at all. Twenty-six runs per wicket in the first innings of a Test and seventeen in the third, and no team total above 477 in two matches.
- The venue's international record is mostly other people's cricket. Six of ten T20 internationals and three of eight one-day internationals did not involve India.
- India have never lost a Test here and lost two of five one-day matches. The Test record is two from two; the fifty-over record includes the lowest total the ground has seen, which was India's.
Sources and method
The tables above are computed from Cricsheet's ball-by-ball archive, released under the Open Data Commons Attribution Licence: two men's Tests, eight men's one-day internationals, ten men's Twenty20 internationals and nineteen IPL matches at this ground. Cricsheet withholds every fixture involving the Afghanistan men's team, which is why one of the ground's five 2023 World Cup matches does not appear in any count here; that match is acknowledged rather than absorbed.
Only dismissals a scorer attributes to a bowler are counted as wickets, so run-outs sit outside the bowling figures. The elevation, the seating capacity, the 2003 opening and the 2023 outfield criticism are taken from the Himachal Pradesh Cricket Association's published information and contemporaneous tournament reporting; they are described rather than derived. Figures were checked in August 2026 and the Twenty20 rows move each season. For comparison, see the iconic cricket stadiums survey, the companion Dharamsala pitch and scoring report, the Mohali venue record for the older northern ground, and the cricket in India hub.