MCA Stadium Pitch Report & Average Scores | Pune

Only three men's Tests have been played at the Maharashtra Cricket Association Stadium and India have lost two of them, both heavily. That is a record no other Indian venue in regular use can match, and it sits awkwardly beside the ground's white-ball numbers, which are among the most batting-friendly in the country. Eleven one-day internationals here have produced a mean first innings of 310 and a median of 317. Thirty-five Indian Premier League matches have produced 8.22 runs an over.

The stadium sits at Gahunje, some way outside Pune proper, and opened in 2012. Its square has never settled into a single identity. In February 2017 Australia won by 333 runs on a pitch that turned from the first session and was subsequently rated poor by the International Cricket Council; in October 2019 India made 601 for 5 declared on the same square and won by an innings; in October 2024 New Zealand won by 113 runs to take an unassailable series lead, the first time India had lost a home Test series in twelve years. Three matches, three completely different surfaces.

That variability is the honest headline for this ground. Anyone quoting a Pune average score needs to say which format and, in the red-ball case, which match.

Scoring by format at Gahunje

Figures are computed from the delivery-level record for this venue. Boundary share is the share of all 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	Feb 2017 – Oct 2024	373	260	3.26	26.1	48.0	53%
ODI (men)	11	Oct 2013 – Nov 2023	310	317	6.08	38.8	38.3	52%
T20I (men)	4	Feb 2016 – Jan 2025	172	191	8.36	19.9	14.3	59%
IPL	35	Apr 2013 – May 2022	168	169	8.22	25.6	18.7	57%

The Test row is where the mean and the median part company most violently. A mean first innings of 373 against a median of 260 tells you that one innings — India's 601 for 5 in 2019 — is doing all the lifting. Strip it out and the other two first innings were 260 and 259. The Test runs-per-wicket figure of 26.1 is low for an Indian venue and is the more representative number.

The one-day row runs the other way. A median first innings of 317 across eleven matches, with 38.8 runs per wicket, describes a genuinely flat surface with a fast outfield. Six of the eleven first innings passed 300 and only one, New Zealand's 230 for 9 in October 2017, fell below 256.

The three Tests: two India defeats and one landslide

Dates	Match	Innings	Result
Feb 2017	India v Australia	Australia 260; India 105; Australia 285; India 107	Australia won by 333 runs
Oct 2019	India v South Africa	India 601-5 dec; South Africa 275; South Africa 189	India won by an innings and 137 runs
Oct 2024	India v New Zealand	New Zealand 259; India 156; New Zealand 255; India 245	New Zealand won by 113 runs

February 2017 remains the most discussed pitch in the ground's history. India were dismissed for 105 and 107, their two lowest completed innings at any home venue in that decade, and Steve O'Keefe — a left-arm spinner with a modest Test record — took six wickets in each innings. Steve Smith's 109 in the third innings was made on a surface on which nobody else on either side passed 68 across four innings. The ICC rated the pitch poor.

October 2019 was the correction. Virat Kohli made 254 not out from 336 balls, Mayank Agarwal 108, and India declared on 601 for 5 before dismissing South Africa twice. The same square that had produced 105 and 107 two and a half years earlier gave up 601 in 156.5 overs.

October 2024 is the most instructive of the three because the pitch was neither a disgrace nor a road. Mitchell Santner took thirteen wickets in the match, New Zealand were bowled out for 259 and 255, and India managed 156 and 245. Yashasvi Jaiswal's 77 from 65 balls in the fourth innings was the only innings above fifty in either of India's efforts. A surface on which both sides averaged in the twenties, and on which a slow left-armer was the decisive bowler, is a fair Test pitch that India happened to play badly on — a distinction worth making, because the 2017 comparison was reached for at the time and does not hold up.

The series context for these matches is on the Border-Gavaskar Trophy history page and the broader arc on the Test cricket in India page.

The one-day ground: 310 batting first, and it usually is not enough

Phase	Runs per over	Balls per wicket
Overs 1–10	5.46	60.0
Overs 11–40	5.82	41.2
Overs 41–50	7.99	21.6

The first ten overs at Pune cost a wicket only once every sixty balls, the safest opening passage of any phase in this page's data. Batters are not threatened by the new ball here. The middle overs then tighten slightly in wicket terms while the run rate barely moves, and the last ten go at just under eight an over.

The eleven one-day internationals include four matches from the 2023 World Cup and three from England's tour in March 2021, and the March 2021 series is the ground's best evidence. India made 317 for 5, 336 for 6 and 329, and the three matches finished 66 runs to India, six wickets to England chasing 337, and seven runs to India. Jonny Bairstow's hundred in the second of those got England home with 6.1 overs unused. Three consecutive totals above 315, one of them chased down comfortably, is the clearest statement the venue has made about itself.

The largest total the ground has seen is South Africa's 357 for 4 against New Zealand in November 2023, in a match South Africa won by 190 runs after New Zealand were bowled out for 167. The lowest completed one-day innings is New Zealand's 230 for 9 in 2017 — the ground has never seen a side dismissed under 167 in the format.

Kohli's aggregate of 1,104 runs at 58.1 across formats here is the largest by any batter at the venue, and where that sits in his wider record is on the India ODI most runs page. The ground's own leaderboards are on the MCA Stadium records page, and the fifty-over context is on the ODI cricket in India page.

Bowling at Pune: quick bowlers pay, and take wickets anyway

Bowler	Balls	Runs	Wickets	Average	Economy
Ravichandran Ashwin	1,239	786	28	28.1	3.81
Ravindra Jadeja	1,290	780	22	35.5	3.63
Umesh Yadav	438	346	22	15.7	4.74
Shardul Thakur	422	551	20	27.6	7.83
Bhuvneshwar Kumar	480	474	16	29.6	5.93
Jasprit Bumrah	498	460	15	30.7	5.54
Mitchell Santner	429	306	15	20.4	4.28
Washington Sundar	379	313	14	22.4	4.96

Threshold: 300 legal deliveries at the venue across all formats in the archive.

Umesh Yadav's 22 wickets at 15.7 is the standout average, and it is the sort of return a fast bowler produces on a surface with carry. Shardul Thakur's 20 wickets at an economy of 7.83 is the opposite sort of line — expensive, mostly white-ball, and effective anyway.

Santner's 15 wickets at 20.4 across 429 deliveries is the best combination of average and economy among the visiting bowlers, and the bulk of it came in that one October 2024 Test. Jadeja's average of 35.5 here is his least productive figure at any of India's regular venues, which is another way of saying this is not a ground where finger spin has been given much help outside 2017.

What the toss has been worth, and the death-overs problem

Across 53 completed men's matches at the venue in the archive, the toss winner has won 28 — a coin-flip. But the decision itself has been anything but balanced: captains have chosen to field in 42 of 53 tosses and to bat in eleven, and in the Indian Premier League the figure is 31 fielding to four batting.

That preference has not been rewarded. The IPL record at Pune is 18 wins batting first to 17 chasing. In one-day internationals it is six to five in favour of batting first. Only in Twenty20 internationals, on a four-match sample, has the side batting first won three of four. A ground where nearly eighty per cent of captains bowl first and the results split evenly is a ground where the toss decision is habit rather than analysis.

Phase (IPL)	Runs per over	Balls per wicket
Overs 1–6	7.55	23.8
Overs 7–15	7.69	21.7
Overs 16–20	10.25	11.9

The death overs at Pune run at 10.25 an over, the highest phase figure at the venue, and cost a wicket every 11.9 balls. That combination — a very high rate and rapid wicket loss — is what a flat pitch with a fast outfield produces at the end of an innings. Sides setting a target here have generally been able to add 50 in the last five overs, and sides defending one have generally needed to.

The 35 Indian Premier League matches were played across 2013 to 2022, largely as home fixtures for the Pune franchises and later as a neutral venue during the pandemic-affected seasons. The competition's own record is at the Indian Premier League hub.

Four things the data says that the reputation does not

The Test reputation rests on one bad pitch. February 2017 was rated poor and is quoted whenever the ground comes up, but two-thirds of the venue's red-ball record consists of a 601 for 5 and a fair, low-scoring match decided by good slow bowling.

Pune is one of the safest places in India to open the batting in a one-day international. Sixty balls per wicket in the first ten overs is a high figure, and it holds across eleven matches and eleven years.

Fast bowling works here better than the format averages suggest. Umesh Yadav at 15.7 and Bumrah at 30.7 across white-ball cricket are returns from a surface with bounce, not from a flat pitch that offers seam bowlers nothing.

And the ground is the clearest case in India of the toss decision being made on reflex. Thirty-one captains choosing to field in 35 IPL matches, on a ground where batting first has won more often, is the sort of pattern that persists because nobody re-examines it. Comparable Maharashtra conditions are covered on the Wankhede Stadium pitch report, the venue's national standing on the iconic Indian cricket stadiums page, and the wider game at the cricket in India hub.

Sources and method

Run rates, wicket intervals, boundary shares, phase splits, first-innings distributions and toss outcomes are computed from ball-by-ball delivery records for this venue covering men's Tests, one-day internationals, Twenty20 internationals and Indian Premier League matches from April 2013 to January 2025. The two venue name variants in the source data were merged before counting.

Match results, margins, individual scores, tosses and player-of-the-match awards were verified against ESPNcricinfo scorecards and Statsguru ground records for the Maharashtra Cricket Association Stadium, read on 30 August 2026. The International Cricket Council's poor rating for the February 2017 pitch is a matter of published record.

Where a mean is distorted by a single innings, the median is given alongside it and the distortion is named. Bowling tables carry a stated delivery threshold, below which returns at a single ground are too small to be meaningful.

This page gives no pace-versus-spin breakdown. Classifying every bowler in the venue archive by type was not possible from the source data with the reliability the rest of these figures have, and an estimate presented alongside computed numbers would misrepresent its own accuracy.

Match counts reflect fixtures with complete delivery-level records rather than the venue's entire fixture history, and all figures will move with future allocations.