JSCA International Stadium Pitch Report & Average Scores | Ranchi

Most Indian grounds get flatter as the format gets shorter. Ranchi does the opposite. The three men's Tests played at the JSCA International Stadium Complex have produced a mean first innings of 434 and a median of 451, figures that put the ground among the most generous red-ball surfaces in the country. The seven Indian Premier League matches held here between 2013 and 2015 produced a mean first innings of 149, one of the lowest returns of any venue that has hosted a full IPL allocation. Same square, same soil, two entirely different reputations.

The explanation is not mysterious, but it is worth stating plainly because it governs everything else on this page. Ranchi's pitch is slow. In a Test match, slowness means a ball that comes on to the bat at a predictable height for two days before wear sets in, which is why Australia made 451 here in 2017 and India replied with 603 for 9. In a twenty-over match, slowness means a ball that grips, holds up, and refuses to go anywhere off the middle of a cross-batted swing. The surface has not changed its character between formats; only the value of that character to a batter has.

The ground opened for international cricket in January 2013 and remains the newest of India's regular Test venues in the eastern belt. It is also, unavoidably, Mahendra Singh Dhoni's home ground, which has shaped its fixture list more than its playing conditions. What follows is drawn from the delivery-level record rather than from reputation.

Format by format at the JSCA complex

All figures are computed from the ball-by-ball archive for this venue. Boundary share is the percentage of total runs scored in fours and sixes. Balls per wicket counts legal deliveries only.

Format	Matches	Span	Mean 1st innings	Median	Runs per over	Runs per wicket	Balls per wicket	Boundary share
Test (men)	3	Mar 2017 – Feb 2024	434	451	3.07	33.9	66.1	49%
ODI (men)	7	Jan 2013 – Nov 2025	277	286	5.76	36.9	38.5	51%
T20I (men)	4	Feb 2016 – Jan 2023	161	164	7.98	23.5	17.7	56%
IPL	7	May 2013 – May 2015	149	148	7.55	25.4	20.2	52%

The Test row carries the smallest sample and the largest numbers. Three matches is not enough to call a ground a batting paradise, but the shape of those three is consistent: no side has been bowled out cheaply batting first, and the lowest first innings of the set is England's 353 in February 2024.

Set the Test runs-per-wicket figure of 33.9 against the ODI figure of 36.9 and the two are almost identical. That is unusual. At most Indian venues the fifty-over game is materially easier on batters than the five-day game, because there is no fourth-innings surface and no reverse swing worth the name. At Ranchi the two formats cost a wicket at nearly the same price, and the difference shows up in tempo rather than in survival — 3.07 an over against 5.76.

The three Tests, and why none of them was routine

Dates	Match	Innings	Result
Mar 2017	India v Australia	Australia 451; India 603-9 dec; Australia 204-6	Drawn
Oct 2019	India v South Africa	India 497-9 dec; South Africa 162; South Africa 133	India won by an innings and 202 runs
Feb 2024	India v England	England 353; India 307; England 145; India 192-5	India won by 5 wickets

The March 2017 fixture is the ground's signature match and its best evidence for what the pitch does over five days. Australia batted first and made 451, and India then batted for 210 overs to reach 603 for 9. Cheteshwar Pujara faced 525 balls for 202 — one of the longest innings by balls faced in India's Test history — and Wriddhiman Saha made 117 alongside him. The match still ended in a draw with Australia six down in the fourth innings. A surface that permits a 525-ball innings on days three and four is not one that deteriorates sharply.

October 2019 looks superficially like a spinning-pitch result — an innings win with South Africa bowled out for 162 and 133 — but the first innings tells the truer story. India made 497 for 9 declared, and Rohit Sharma made 212, his highest Test score and part of a series in which he was reinventing himself as a red-ball opener. The pitch did not collapse; a South African side without an answer to Indian spin did.

February 2024 was the closest of the three and the most useful for anyone reading conditions. England, one down and needing the match, made 353 and then 145. India's 307 in reply included a debut-season innings of 90 by Dhruv Jurel, who was named player of the match on a surface that had begun to grip by the third afternoon. India chased 192 for the loss of five wickets. That is the only fourth-innings chase of any size the ground has seen, and it went comfortably.

The broader red-ball context for these three matches sits in the guide to Test cricket in India, and Ranchi's place among the country's Test venues is covered on the India Test cricket grounds page.

Bowling returns: two spinners, and everyone else

Bowler	Balls	Runs	Wickets	Average	Economy
Ravindra Jadeja	1,376	722	31	23.3	3.15
Ravichandran Ashwin	1,085	718	24	29.9	3.97
Kuldeep Yadav	384	263	15	17.5	4.11
Mohammed Shami	276	162	10	16.2	3.52
Umesh Yadav	444	288	9	32.0	3.89
Shoaib Bashir	420	205	8	25.6	2.93
Pat Cummins	284	149	7	21.3	3.15

Threshold: 200 legal deliveries at the venue across all formats in the archive.

Jadeja's 31 wickets at 23.3 is the leading return, and his economy of 3.15 across nearly 1,400 deliveries is the number that describes the ground best. A left-arm spinner who concedes barely three an over at a venue is bowling on a surface that offers control rather than sharp turn. Ashwin's average of 29.9 here is well above his career figure, which is the same signal read from the other side.

The two most economical returns in the table belong to Shoaib Bashir and Cummins, both at ground level under 3.20, and both achieved in the 2024 and 2017 Tests respectively. Mohammed Shami's ten wickets at 16.2 is the best average on the list and came largely in October 2019, when the ball reversed on the fourth afternoon.

Kuldeep Yadav's 15 wickets at 17.5 spans formats and includes his four-wicket haul against Australia in the October 2017 Twenty20 international, when Australia were dismissed for 118 in 18.4 overs. That remains the lowest completed innings total at the ground in any format. How this generation of Indian slow bowlers came to dominate at home is set out in the India spin bowling tradition page.

The fifty-over record: a stiff start, a slow middle

Phase	Runs per over	Balls per wicket
Overs 1–10	5.06	38.3
Overs 11–40	5.64	50.4
Overs 41–50	7.10	20.6

Two things stand out. The first ten overs go at 5.06, which is slow by modern standards and reflects a new ball that does something off the surface early. The middle overs then cost a wicket only once every fifty balls — the safest passage of play the ground offers — but yield just 5.64 an over. Batters survive the middle at Ranchi; they do not accelerate through it.

The seven one-day internationals split three wins to India, two to the visitors, one no result and one — the most recent — a genuinely high-scoring match. In November 2025 India made 349 for 8 and South Africa were dismissed for 332, an aggregate of 681 that is comfortably the largest the venue has produced. Virat Kohli was player of the match, as he had been in the ground's first one-day international in January 2013, when England were bowled out for 155 and India chased it in 28.2 overs.

Kohli's aggregate here is 615 runs at 76.9 across formats, the largest by any batter at the venue, with Rohit Sharma next on 478. Where those two sit in the wider record is on the India ODI most runs page, and the ground's own leaderboards are on the JSCA International Stadium records page.

What the toss has actually been worth

Across the 21 completed men's matches at the venue in the archive, the toss winner has won nine. Captains have chosen to field in 15 of 21 tosses and to bat in six, and every one of the three Tests began with the side winning the toss electing to bat.

The white-ball picture favours chasing without being emphatic. In the Indian Premier League the side batting second won five of seven; in one-day internationals the split is three and three with one no result; in Twenty20 internationals it is two apiece. Dew is the usual explanation for chasing at Indian venues in the evening, and Ranchi in October and November is dewy enough for it to matter, but a combined chasing record of ten wins from eighteen results is not the sort of edge that decides a strategy on its own.

The clearer toss signal is the one buried in the phase table above: the death overs at Ranchi cost a wicket every 10.4 balls in IPL matches and every 8.5 balls in Twenty20 internationals. A side batting first here loses wickets faster at the end of an innings than it does anywhere in the middle, which caps first-innings totals more effectively than the run rate suggests.

The IPL years, and why the numbers are so low

Ranchi hosted seven Indian Premier League matches across three seasons, all of them as a secondary home for Kolkata Knight Riders or Chennai Super Kings rather than as a franchise's own ground. The results:

Date	Match	Scores	Result
May 2013	RCB v Kolkata	RCB 115-9; Kolkata 116-5	Kolkata won by 5 wickets
May 2013	Pune Warriors v Kolkata	Pune 170-4; Kolkata 163-7	Pune won by 7 runs
May 2014	Chennai v Kolkata	Chennai 148-3 (17 ov); Kolkata 114-9	Chennai won by 34 runs
May 2014	Rajasthan v Chennai	Rajasthan 148-8; Chennai 149-5	Chennai won by 5 wickets
May 2014	Chennai v RCB	Chennai 138-4; RCB 142-5	RCB won by 5 wickets
May 2014	Chennai v Sunrisers	Chennai 185-3; Sunrisers 189-4	Sunrisers won by 6 wickets
May 2015	RCB v Chennai	RCB 139-8; Chennai 140-7	Chennai won by 3 wickets

Six of the seven first innings finished under 175 and three finished under 150. The 185 for 3 that Chennai made in May 2014, chased down by Sunrisers Hyderabad with three balls to spare, is the only innings above that mark. Royal Challengers Bangalore's 115 for 9 in the first of the seven is the lowest.

Two qualifications belong here. The sample is seven matches, all played between 2013 and 2015, and Twenty20 scoring across the whole competition has risen substantially since. A modern IPL fixture at this ground would very likely produce higher totals than the 149 mean above, and nothing in the archive tests that. The venue has not hosted the competition since 2015. For what the league's scoring looks like now, the Indian Premier League hub is the starting point.

Reading the ground before a match

Four practical observations follow from the data rather than from watching a highlights package.

Ranchi rewards the side that bats long rather than the side that bats fast. The Test balls-per-wicket figure of 66.1 is high, the ODI middle-overs figure of 50.4 is higher still relative to the format, and both are ground characteristics rather than accidents of who batted. A team arriving with a plan to bat 130 overs will usually get to do it.

Spin here is a control weapon, not a wicket-taking one in the first innings. Jadeja's 3.15 economy and Bashir's 2.93 make the point from opposite ends of the quality scale. Sides that have tried to force the pace against slow bowling at this ground have generally lost wickets doing it.

The death overs are the pitch's one genuinely difficult phase. Both the IPL and Twenty20 international records show wickets falling roughly twice as fast after the fifteenth over as before it, on a surface where the ball is not coming on.

And the venue's reputation is set by its Test record while its shortest-format record says the opposite. Anyone quoting a Ranchi average score should say which format they mean, because the honest answer ranges from 149 to 434 depending on the question. The iconic Indian cricket stadiums page places the ground in the national picture, and comparable eastern-belt conditions are covered on the Barabati Stadium pitch report. The rest of the Indian game starts at the cricket in India hub.

Sources and method

The scoring, wicket, boundary, phase and toss figures on this page are computed from the ball-by-ball delivery records for this venue across men's Tests, men's and women's one-day internationals, Twenty20 internationals and Indian Premier League matches, covering January 2013 to November 2025. Venue name variants in the source data — "JSCA International Stadium Complex" with and without the city suffix — were merged before counting.

Match results, margins, tosses, player-of-the-match awards and innings totals were checked against ESPNcricinfo's scorecards and Statsguru ground records for this stadium, read on 30 August 2026.

Means and medians are given together wherever a sample is small enough for one large score to move the mean, which is the case in every format here. Bowling and batting tables carry a stated threshold; below those thresholds the figures are too noisy to publish. No pace-versus-spin split is given on this page because classifying every bowler in the archive by type could not be done reliably from the source data, and an estimated split would be worse than none.

Test, one-day international and Twenty20 international match counts are those in the delivery-level archive and reflect matches with complete ball-by-ball records rather than the venue's total fixture history. Records at this ground will move with the next international allocation, and the Indian Premier League figures describe 2013 to 2015 only.