MA Chidambaram Stadium Pitch Report & Average Scores | Chennai
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Cricket in India10 min read
The reputation says Chepauk is a spinner's ground where batting is a struggle. The first half of that is true and the second half is not. Across the eight men's Tests here that ball-by-ball scoring covers, the side batting first has averaged 404 — the highest opening-innings figure of any major Indian venue — and a wicket in the opening innings has cost 40.4 runs against a national figure of 38.2. Sides arrive, win the toss, bat, and get a big score. What happens afterwards is the part that decides matches.
By the third innings the same square yields 32.5 runs a wicket and by the fourth 29.1. That is a slide of eleven runs a wicket from start to finish, and it happens without the dramatic crumbling that a Chennai Test is often described as producing. Spin has taken 168 of the 256 Test wickets credited to a bowler here, but it has taken them at 34.3 apiece, which is four runs worse than spin averages across Indian Test grounds as a whole. The surface does not gift wickets. It removes the batter's margin gradually and then keeps removing it.
The twenty-over record runs the opposite way from every part of that. In 98 Indian Premier League matches the first innings has averaged 165.6 against a league-wide 171.4, and the middle overs here are the slowest passage of play at any of the country's five biggest grounds. One square, two formats, and two entirely different conclusions about how hard it is to score.
Every figure below is derived from over-by-over match records for the men's game: Tests and one-day internationals at Chepauk from the 2003 season onward, and all Twenty20 internationals and IPL fixtures staged here. Points that data cannot measure — the soil, the heat, the way a curator prepares a strip — are separated out and marked as description.
The Test slide, innings by innings
| Test innings | Runs per wicket at Chepauk | Runs per wicket, Indian venues |
|---|---|---|
| First | 40.4 | 38.2 |
| Second | 41.5 | 36.6 |
| Third | 32.5 | 28.0 |
| Fourth | 29.1 | 25.5 |
Every one of those four numbers is higher than the national equivalent, which is the single most surprising thing in Chepauk's record. A ground with a national reputation for difficulty is, measured against the rest of India, consistently the easier place to bat — in all four innings.
The eight Tests have produced a first-innings mean of 404 and a median of 378, with 578 the largest (England, February 2021) and 235 the smallest (Australia, October 2004). The overall scoring rate is 3.27 an over and 71 per cent of deliveries are dot balls, which is close to the Indian norm. Chepauk's difficulty is real, but it is a difficulty of accumulation over four days rather than of survival on the first morning. The wider red-ball picture is set out in the history of Test cricket in India, and the ground's own match-by-match ledger sits on the Chepauk records page.
Fourth innings: 387 at one end, 164 at the other
| Fourth innings at Chepauk | Score | Match |
|---|---|---|
| India | 387 for 4 | beat England, December 2008 |
| Bangladesh | 234 all out | lost to India, September 2024 |
| India | 192 all out | lost to England, February 2021 |
| England | 164 all out | lost to India, February 2021 |
| India | 50 for 2 | beat Australia, February 2013 |
| India | 19 for 0 | drew with Australia, October 2004 |
Only six fourth innings have been bowled in the eight Tests, so the 29.1 runs per wicket rests on 36 dismissals and should be read as an indication rather than a settled figure. What the list does show is the shape of the ground's results: two of the six are small chases completed for the loss of two wickets or fewer, and the two collapses under 200 both came in the same fortnight in February 2021, on strips prepared to turn from the first session.
Spin's grip, in strike rate rather than share
| Test bowling at Chepauk | Wickets | Average | Balls per wicket | Economy |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spin | 168 | 34.3 | 64.1 | 3.21 |
| Pace | 88 | 40.3 | 78.1 | 3.10 |
A spinner takes a Test wicket here every 64 balls, a seamer every 78. Both are worse than the corresponding national rates of 60 and 69, which is the statistical form of the same point the innings table made: this is a batting surface that gets slowly less generous, not a minefield.
The economy column is worth reading against the strike-rate column. Pace concedes 3.10 an over and spin 3.21, so a captain holding an end with a seamer is not leaking runs — he is simply waiting longer for a wicket. That balance is why Chennai Tests so often settle into long spells from one spinner at each end, a pattern the guide to India's spin bowling tradition traces back through several generations.
Fifty overs: the middle-over squeeze
| Passage of a Chepauk ODI | Runs per over | Balls per wicket |
|---|---|---|
| Overs 1-10 | 4.92 | 35.5 |
| Overs 11-40 | 5.03 | 45.3 |
| Overs 41-50 | 6.14 | 17.4 |
Set that against the Indian averages of 5.03, 5.21 and 7.32 and the last five overs are where Chepauk differs most. A death-overs rate of 6.14 is more than a run an over below what an Indian one-day international usually produces at the end of an innings, and it is the reason eighteen matches here have a median first innings of 268 against a national median of 276.
The powerplay is the harder part of the innings by wicket count: a wicket every 35 balls in the first ten overs against one every 45 through the middle thirty. New-ball movement in the humid early evening is the standard explanation, and it is consistent with pace holding the better one-day figures here — 159 wickets at 29.4 against spin's 96 at 33.3.
Only two first innings in the record have reached 300, both of them in the same Afro-Asia Cup week of June 2007, and West Indies' 291 for 2 in December 2019 is the largest total any side has chased down here. The tightest finish of recent years came during the 2023 World Cup, when South Africa needed all but fifteen balls of their allocation to pass Pakistan's 270 with one wicket standing.
An IPL first innings that has moved twice
| Season at Chepauk | Matches | Mean first innings |
|---|---|---|
| 2008-2013 | 41 | 166 |
| 2014-2021 | 26 | 156 |
| 2022-2026 | 31 | 173 |
The single lowest season figure is 144, from the eight matches played here in 2019; the highest is 188, from seven in 2026. Those two numbers, five seasons and one rule cycle apart, describe a venue that has been re-prepared rather than one with a fixed character. The 2019 strips were the slowest the ground has produced in the competition's history; the 2026 ones the fastest.
Across all 98 matches the distribution is unusually flat in the middle and thin at the top:
| First innings | Matches |
|---|---|
| Under 120 | 7 |
| 120-139 | 12 |
| 140-159 | 27 |
| 160-179 | 19 |
| 180-199 | 15 |
| 200-219 | 16 |
| 220 or more | 2 |
Nineteen of the 98 first innings here have failed to reach 140, a little under a fifth. At the Chinnaswamy the equivalent share is barely one in ten. Only two innings in eighteen seasons have passed 220, and the ground's most successful chase remains Lucknow Super Giants' 213 for 4 against a target of 211 in April 2024. The home side's record on this square is covered in the Chennai Super Kings guide.
Where twenty-over cricket loses its speed
| Phase | Chepauk IPL | All Indian IPL venues |
|---|---|---|
| Overs 1-6 | 7.87 | 7.88 |
| Overs 7-15 | 7.23 | 7.81 |
| Overs 16-20 | 8.99 | 9.63 |
The powerplay here is indistinguishable from the national figure. Everything after it is slower, and the gap widens as the innings goes on: half a run an over through the middle and nearly two-thirds of a run at the death. Spin costs 7.26 an over at Chepauk against 7.83 across Indian IPL venues, and takes a wicket every 22.5 balls.
The boundary split explains the death-overs figure better than the wicket column does. Chepauk produces a four on 10.6 per cent of deliveries and a six on 4.7 per cent, against national IPL rates of 11.9 and 5.5. Both are down, but the six rate is down by more, and a ground where the rope is harder to clear is a ground where the last four overs cost less. Placement works here; power is only intermittently rewarded.
The eight men's T20 internationals point somewhere else again, but five of them fell inside a single month of the 2026 T20 World Cup, and they average 188.8 in the first innings. Eight matches concentrated into one tournament is not a description of a venue.
The toss, and a rare Indian ground where batting first still wins
| Format | Chose to bat | Chose to field | Side batting first |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tests | 7 | 1 | Won 3, lost 3, drew 2 |
| ODIs | 14 | 4 | Won 9, lost 8, one no result |
| T20Is | 4 | 4 | Won 4, lost 4 |
| IPL | 51 | 47 | Won 51, lost 45 |
The IPL row is the outlier in Indian cricket. At most large grounds in the country the chasing side is ahead over a long run of matches, helped by dew and by the certainty of a target. Here the side batting first has won more than half of the 96 completed games, and captains have accordingly chosen to bat at Chepauk more often than they do almost anywhere else in the league.
The Test row is close to even, which for a home venue is not what you would expect. Three wins and three defeats from eight matches reflects both the February 2021 pair — one lost heavily, one won by 317 runs — and the fact that a Chepauk toss has rarely been the decisive moment of a match.
Heat, humidity and eight strips on one square
Four descriptive points, none of which the ball-by-ball data can confirm:
- The square carries eight pitches, so successive matches at the ground are not necessarily played on comparable surfaces, and the choice of strip is made in the days before a match.
- Chennai's heat and coastal humidity are consistently cited by curators as the reason surfaces here wear faster than the calendar would suggest, which fits the drop from the second innings to the third.
- The square has been described as using a mixture of red soil and black clay rather than one or the other. Reports of the exact blend vary and it has changed over time.
- Test cricket here is scheduled in the dry window — three of the eight in February, two in December — while the IPL occupies April and May. The seasonal frame is set out in the guide to the monsoon and India's cricket season.
What eight Tests cannot tell you
Eight red-ball matches spread over twenty years is a small base for any conclusion, and the ground has been substantially redeveloped inside that period. The one-day record is thin at the top end and the T20 international record is barely a record at all. The IPL figures are the only ones on this page resting on a genuinely large sample, and even they cover four distinct eras of ball and bat regulation.
Nothing here forecasts a particular match. Which of the eight strips is used, how long it has been rolled, and what the weather has done in the preceding week matter more than any twenty-year average. For the way Indian surfaces vary between regions, see the survey of pitch types and conditions.
Sources and method
The tables above are computed from Cricsheet's ball-by-ball match archive, released under the Open Data Commons Attribution Licence. Coverage for this ground is complete for men's Tests and one-day internationals from the 2003 season and for every men's Twenty20 international and IPL match played here; the match counts are stated wherever a figure depends on them. Runs per wicket counts every dismissal, while the pace and spin tables count only wickets a scorer credits to a bowler and sort bowlers by style from a reference list, leaving roughly one per cent of deliveries unassigned rather than guessed. National comparison figures are computed the same way over all men's internationals and IPL matches played at Indian venues in the same archive.
The section on soil, heat and the number of strips is descriptive. It reflects what curators and reporters have consistently said about the ground and cannot be checked against the scoring data. Figures were verified in August 2026 and will shift with each new season played here. Related pages include the survey of India's iconic cricket stadiums and the cricket in India hub.