Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium Records & Stats | Kochi Cricket Ground
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Cricket in India9 min read
Sachin Tendulkar took 154 wickets in one-day international cricket and five in an innings twice. Both came at the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium in Kochi, seven years and one day apart: 5 for 32 against Australia on 1 April 1998, and 5 for 50 against Pakistan on 2 April 2005. No other ground in the world has more than one of them.
That is the most durable thing about Kochi's cricket ground, because the fixtures themselves stopped. The stadium at Kaloor, built in 1996 and owned by the Greater Cochin Development Authority, staged ten one-day internationals between April 1998 and October 2014 and has not been given one since. It has never held a Test or a men's Twenty20 international. Kerala's international cricket has moved south to the Greenfield International Stadium in Thiruvananthapuram, which took its first international in November 2017.
The ground is a multi-purpose bowl — it is better known now as the home of Kerala Blasters in the Indian Super League — with a large outfield and a published capacity in the region of 50,000. The tables below combine the full fixture list with detail computed from ball-by-ball records, which cover the last four of the ten one-day internationals and all five Indian Premier League matches played here.
Every one-day international at Kochi
| Date | Match | Result |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Apr 1998 | India v Australia | India won by 41 runs |
| 9 Mar 2000 | India v South Africa | India won by 3 wickets |
| 13 Mar 2002 | India v Zimbabwe | Zimbabwe won by 6 wickets |
| 2 Apr 2005 | India v Pakistan | India won by 87 runs |
| 6 Apr 2006 | India v England | India won by 4 wickets |
| 2 Oct 2007 | India v Australia | Australia won by 84 runs |
| 17 Oct 2010 | India v Australia | Abandoned without a ball bowled |
| 15 Jan 2013 | India v England | India won by 127 runs |
| 21 Nov 2013 | India v West Indies | India won by 6 wickets |
| 8 Oct 2014 | India v West Indies | West Indies won by 124 runs |
India appear in all ten and won six of the nine that produced a result. Two of their three defeats came against sides they beat comfortably almost everywhere else in the same period — Zimbabwe in 2002 and West Indies in 2014 — which is the sort of pattern a nine-match sample throws up rather than anything the ground explains.
Every match was a bilateral or triangular fixture. No World Cup game, no Champions Trophy game and no Test has been allotted here, and the ground was never in serious contention for one: it was built as a football and athletics venue and adapted, rather than the reverse.
Tendulkar's two five-fors
| 1 April 1998 | 2 April 2005 | |
|---|---|---|
| Opponent | Australia | Pakistan |
| Figures | 5-32 from 10 overs | 5-50 from 10 overs |
| Result | India won by 41 runs | India won by 87 runs |
| India's innings | 309-5; Ajay Jadeja 105 not out, Mohammad Azharuddin 82 | — |
The 1998 match opened the Pepsi Triangular Series. India made 309 for 5, Australia were 268 all out in 45.5 overs with Michael Bevan making 65 and Adam Gilchrist 61, and Tendulkar — bowling a mixture of leg-breaks, off-breaks and seam-up, as he did throughout his career — took five of the ten wickets. He was named player of the match for the bowling rather than the batting, which in a career of 463 one-day internationals almost never happened.
Seven years later, against Pakistan, he removed Inzamam-ul-Haq, Mohammad Hafeez, Abdul Razzaq, Shahid Afridi and Mohammad Sami for 50. That the two performances came on consecutive calendar days at the same ground, in different decades and against different opponents, is a coincidence rather than a fact about the surface. But it is the reason a stand at the stadium carries his name. India's fifty-over record against that opponent is set out in the India v Pakistan ODI head-to-head.
The four matches in the ball-by-ball record
| Match | Scores | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Oct 2007 v Australia | Australia 306-6; India 222 | Australia won by 84 runs |
| Jan 2013 v England | India 285-6; England 158 | India won by 127 runs |
| Nov 2013 v West Indies | West Indies 211; India 212-4 | India won by 6 wickets |
| Oct 2014 v West Indies | West Indies 321-6; India 197 | West Indies won by 124 runs |
Four matches, four decisive results, and not one of them close: the narrowest margin is 84 runs. Three of the four were won by the side batting first, and in the fourth India chased 212 with 14.4 overs to spare.
The 2007 match was the ground's first big total. Andrew Symonds made 87 from 83 balls and Brad Haddin 87 from 69 as Australia reached 306 for 6, and India were bowled out for 222 with MS Dhoni making 58 from 88 in a losing cause. Stuart Clark's 2 for 14 from six overs is the most economical spell in the ground's ball-by-ball record.
The January 2013 win over England is the most complete Indian performance here. Dhoni made 72 from 66, Ravindra Jadeja 61 not out from 37 and Suresh Raina 55; England were then dismissed for 158 in 36 overs with Ravichandran Ashwin taking 3 for 39 and Bhuvneshwar Kumar 3 for 29. It is the largest margin by runs the ground has produced.
Marlon Samuels and the highest total
West Indies' 321 for 6 in October 2014 is the largest score anyone has made at Kochi. Marlon Samuels was 126 not out from 116 balls, Denesh Ramdin made 61 from 59 and Dwayne Smith 46; Mohammed Shami took 4 for 66. India were 197 all out in reply, Shikhar Dhawan making 68 from 92, and lost by 124 runs.
West Indies abandoned the rest of that tour later in the month over a pay dispute with their board, and no international has been played at Kochi since. Samuels's 126 not out is the only century scored here in the ball-by-ball era, and his aggregate of 150 from two innings is the highest by any visiting batter in that sample.
Across the same four matches Dhoni's 151 runs at an average of 50.3 is the largest Indian aggregate, and Ravindra Jadeja's six wickets at 17.8 with an economy rate of 3.96 the best Indian bowling return. Where the ground's totals sit in the national picture is covered in the guide to ODI cricket in India and the list of India's highest successful ODI chases.
October 2010: no ball bowled
The India–Australia one-day international scheduled for 17 October 2010 was abandoned without a ball bowled after persistent rain, and it is the only abandoned match in the ground's record. Kochi sits at the wet end of the Indian calendar for an October fixture: the north-east monsoon runs through the month in Kerala, which is one reason the state's international dates now tend to sit in November and December. The scheduling problem is explained in the guide to the monsoon and the Indian cricket season.
Kochi Tuskers Kerala: one season, five home nights
| 2011 IPL at Kochi | Result |
|---|---|
| 9 Apr v Royal Challengers Bangalore | RCB won by 6 wkts; AB de Villiers 54 |
| 18 Apr v Chennai Super Kings | Kochi won by 7 wkts; Brendon McCullum 47 |
| 27 Apr v Deccan Chargers | Deccan won by 55 runs; Kochi 74 all out |
| 30 Apr v Delhi Daredevils | Delhi won by 38 runs; Virender Sehwag 80 from 47 |
| 5 May v Kolkata Knight Riders | Kochi won by 17 runs; Mahela Jayawardene 55 |
Kochi Tuskers Kerala played one IPL season before the franchise was terminated, and these five matches are the whole of the ground's record in the competition. They won two.
The 27 April defeat produced both extremes of the ground's short-format record. Deccan Chargers made only 129 for 7, Sangakkara scoring 65, and Kochi were then bowled out for 74 in 16.3 overs — the lowest total the ground has seen in any format. Ishant Sharma took 5 for 12 from three overs, which remains the best bowling analysis recorded here, and Dale Steyn 3 for 16.
Sehwag's 80 from 47 balls three days later is the highest individual score at the ground in the competition. Vinay Kumar's seven wickets across the five matches is the most by any bowler, and Jayawardene's 111 runs the most by any batter — small numbers, because a single home season is all there was.
Four things the Kochi record shows
- Its most famous performances are both bowling figures by a batter. Tendulkar's 5 for 32 and 5 for 50 are the only two five-wicket hauls of his one-day career and both were taken here.
- The ground does not produce close finishes. Of the nine one-day internationals that reached a result, the tightest was decided by three wickets in 2000; the four in the ball-by-ball record were settled by 84 runs or more.
- It has never held a Test or a men's T20 international. Ten fifty-over matches and five IPL nights in thirty years is the whole of its senior record.
- The last international played here came weeks before a tour collapsed. October 2014 was not planned as a farewell, and no fixture has been allotted since.
Sources and method
The full fixture list above is compiled from published match records and ESPNcricinfo ground information. The detailed figures — scores, individual innings, bowling analyses, aggregates and averages for the four one-day internationals from October 2007 onwards and for all five 2011 IPL matches — are computed from Cricsheet's ball-by-ball archive, licensed under Open Data Commons Attribution and read in August 2026.
The six earlier one-day internationals, from April 1998 to April 2006, sit outside that archive. What is said about them here — the 1998 scores and Ajay Jadeja's hundred, Tendulkar's two five-wicket hauls and the players he dismissed in 2005, the results of the 2000, 2002 and 2006 matches — comes from published scorecards and is not folded into any computed aggregate. Where this page gives an aggregate or an average, it covers the ball-by-ball sample only and says so.
Wickets are credited to a bowler only where the scorer attributed the dismissal, so run-outs sit outside every analysis quoted. Tendulkar's career totals — 463 one-day internationals and 154 wickets — are taken from his published record rather than computed here. The 1996 construction, the Kaloor location, the Greater Cochin Development Authority's ownership and the stadium's dual use for football are descriptive; published seating figures vary and none is used in a calculation.
The reading of Kerala's October weather as a reason for the 2010 abandonment is an interpretation of the region's climate rather than a measured result, and one washout is not evidence of a pattern. For the country's other venues see India's iconic cricket stadiums and the guide to pitch types and conditions; for everything else, the cricket in India hub.