Narendra Modi Stadium Pitch Report & Average Scores | Ahmedabad
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Cricket in India9 min read
Ahmedabad's ground produces the two opposite reputations at once, and both are earned. Across twenty-one men's one-day internationals here the first innings averages 252 — twenty-one runs below the figure for Indian venues as a whole. Across fourteen men's Twenty20 internationals it averages 194, more than twenty above the national mark. Same square, same soil, two formats pulling in different directions.
The reason is not mysterious once the phase data is laid out. Fifty-over cricket at this ground is slow in the middle: overs eleven to forty have gone at 5.02 an over here against 5.33 across Indian grounds generally, and the last ten have gone at 7.00 against 7.58. In twenty-over cricket there is no middle period to grind through, so the surface's principal characteristic — a good, true bounce with the ball coming on at an even height — is expressed as scoring rather than as containment.
This page uses the ball-by-ball record of matches played at the Sardar Patel Stadium at Motera and at the Narendra Modi Stadium that replaced it on the same site. The playing surface was relaid in the rebuild, so the Test and one-day figures span two grounds and the Twenty20 international figures largely one. Where that matters it is said.
Average first innings, by format
| Format | Matches | Mean 1st innings | Median | Lower quartile | Upper quartile | Runs per over |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Test (men) | 9 | 319 | 398 | 162 | 480 | 3.16 |
| ODI (men) | 21 | 252 | 262 | 223 | 285 | 5.30 |
| T20I (men) | 14 | 194 | 189 | 175 | 224 | 9.22 |
| IPL | 53 | 181 | 178 | 159 | 203 | 8.94 |
The Test row is the one to distrust. Nine first innings have produced 76, 112, 162, 205, 398, 426, 480, 487 and 521 — a distribution with nothing in the middle, which is why the mean sits eighty runs below the median. A ground where a first innings is either under 210 or over 390 is not described by an average at all.
The three limited-overs rows are worth more. Twenty-one one-day first innings is a reasonable sample and it lands tightly: half of them between 223 and 285, only three above 300, and the highest, South Africa's 365 for 2 in 2010, an outlier by fifty runs. Fifty-three IPL innings is a large sample by ground standards and its interquartile range, 159 to 203, is narrower than the league average.
The one-day ground is slower than India's average
| Metric | Ahmedabad | All Indian venues |
|---|---|---|
| Mean 1st innings | 252 | 273 |
| Runs per over | 5.30 | 5.64 |
| Overs 1-10, runs per over | 5.02 | 5.23 |
| Overs 11-40, runs per over | 5.02 | 5.33 |
| Overs 41-50, runs per over | 7.00 | 7.58 |
| Fours as a share of balls | 7.9% | 8.9% |
| Sixes as a share of balls | 1.4% | 1.8% |
Every line runs the same way. The gap in the middle overs is the largest in proportional terms and it is the one that shapes matches here: a side sixty for one after ten overs at Ahmedabad has historically not been able to move through the second stanza at the rate the same start would produce at Bengaluru or Indore.
The boundary percentages explain the mechanism. Batters here hit fewer fours and fewer sixes per ball than the Indian norm while playing out a broadly similar number of dots — 52.2 per cent against 51.1. The runs that go missing are boundary runs, not singles, which is consistent with a large square boundary and an outfield that does not race.
Twenty-over cricket, where the same surface reads as quick
| Phase | Ahmedabad T20I | All Indian T20I | Ahmedabad IPL | All Indian IPL |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overs 1-6 | 8.73 | 8.21 | 8.61 | 8.19 |
| Overs 7-15 | 8.97 | 8.24 | 8.51 | 8.06 |
| Overs 16-20 | 10.45 | 10.15 | 10.32 | 10.16 |
| Whole innings | 9.22 | 8.65 | 8.94 | 8.57 |
The international figure is above the Indian mean in every phase and by the widest margin in the middle overs — 8.97 against 8.24, a gap of nearly three-quarters of a run. Fourteen matches is a small sample and six of them were played during the 2026 home World Cup, a fortnight that supplied both the highest total the ground has seen in the format and one of its lowest, so the figure should be read as a tendency rather than a constant.
The IPL row is drawn from a much larger sample and points the same way at a smaller magnitude. Ahmedabad's league first innings averages 181 against 170 across all Indian grounds. Boundaries are the difference again, in the opposite direction from the fifty-over case: 6.68 per cent of balls here go for six against 5.72 per cent nationally.
The IPL first innings by season
| Season | Matches | Mean 1st innings |
|---|---|---|
| 2010 | 4 | 158 |
| 2014 | 4 | 171 |
| 2015 | 4 | 160 |
| 2021 | 5 | 159 |
| 2022 | 2 | 144 |
| 2023 | 9 | 195 |
| 2024 | 8 | 172 |
| 2025 | 9 | 216 |
| 2026 | 8 | 182 |
The 2021 and 2022 numbers were made on newly laid strips in the rebuilt stadium during a bio-secure season and belong to a different ground from the one that produced 216 in 2025. That 2025 figure — nine matches, the lowest of them 190 — is comfortably the highest single-season first-innings mean the ground has produced. It fell back to 182 in 2026, which is the more useful guide for a preview: this is a ground where 180 is a competitive first innings and 210 is a good one, not one where 216 is the baseline.
Pace against spin
| Format | Spin's share of overs | Pace average | Spin average | Pace economy | Spin economy |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Test (men) | 63.5% | 41.6 | 33.7 | 3.52 | 2.93 |
| ODI (men) | 43.1% | 32.5 | 37.4 | 5.48 | 5.00 |
| T20I (men) | 30.0% | 27.8 | 37.2 | 9.06 | 9.45 |
| IPL | 36.1% | 30.2 | 28.6 | 9.12 | 8.48 |
Spin bowls more here in Tests than at Indian grounds generally — 63.5 per cent of overs against 59.6 — and takes 157 of the 245 wickets that fall to bowlers. But its average, 33.7, is worse than the 31.8 spinners manage across Indian Test grounds, and pace averages 41.6 against 36.8. Both disciplines find this a harder surface than the Indian norm, which is another way of saying the same thing the first-innings distribution says: when this pitch is good it is very good.
In white-ball cricket the ordering flips. Spin has the better economy in one-day and IPL cricket but the worse strike rate in both limited-overs international formats, and in Twenty20 internationals spin bowls only three overs in ten and averages 37.2. Captains have voted with the ball: the seam-heavy attacks that Gujarat Titans have used at home reflect a ground where pace is at least as effective and considerably easier to set a field for. India's own division of labour between the two skills is set out in the guides to spin bowling in India and the evolution of Indian fast bowling.
The toss, and what actually happens
| Format | Chose to bat | Chose to field | Side batting first won | Side batting second won |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Test (men) | 9 | 0 | 2 | 4 |
| ODI (men) | 10 | 11 | 9 | 12 |
| T20I (men) | 3 | 11 | 9 | 5 |
| IPL | 14 | 39 | 26 | 26 |
The Twenty20 international row contains the ground's sharpest contradiction. Captains have bowled first in eleven of fourteen matches; the side batting first has won nine. That does not prove chasing is wrong — the sample is fourteen and it includes World Cup fixtures where the sides were unevenly matched — but it does mean the automatic decision to field has not been rewarded here in the way it has at most Indian venues.
The IPL split, twenty-six wins each from fifty-three matches, is as close to neutral as a ground record gets, and it comes despite captains choosing to field thirty-nine times out of fifty-three. Every Test toss has been won and used to bat, and the side batting first has won two and lost four of the six that produced a result.
Season and scheduling
| Format | Months used |
|---|---|
| Test (men) | February, March, April, October, November, December |
| ODI (men) | February, March, April, October, November, December |
| T20I (men) | February, March, December |
| IPL | March, April, May, June |
Ahmedabad is a hot, dry city and the ground's international season splits into two windows either side of the summer. February and March fixtures are played in rising heat on strips prepared after a long dry spell; October and November games follow the retreat of the monsoon and are the ones most likely to see dew in the second innings. The IPL block runs through April and May, the hottest part of the year, when the square is at its driest and the ball skids on.
Dew is the single biggest match-day variable and it is not captured anywhere in the tables above. A one-day international here in late October is a substantially different proposition after sunset from the same fixture in the first week of March, and no ground-wide average can distinguish them.
What this page does not settle
Fourteen Twenty20 internationals and nine Tests are small samples, and the nine Tests span two different playing surfaces separated by a demolition. The one-day and IPL figures are strong enough to bear weight; the Test figures are best read as a list of nine results rather than as an average. The match-by-match record, the individual landmarks and the ground's honours are set out on the Narendra Modi Stadium records page, and the ground's place among India's major venues in the guide to India's iconic cricket stadiums.
Nothing here accounts for the specific strip used. The square carries several pitches and the choice among them — a fresh one, a used one, one shaved for a knockout — moves the numbers more than any seasonal effect. Previews that claim to know how a particular Ahmedabad pitch will behave are describing a decision made by the curator that week, not a property of the ground. The broader question of how Indian surfaces are prepared is covered in the guide to pitch types and conditions in India, and the country's cricket as a whole on the cricket in India hub.
Sources and method
Every figure on this page is computed from delivery-level records of men's matches played at Ahmedabad — Tests and one-day internationals from the 2005 season onward, and all Twenty20 internationals and IPL matches at the ground. The comparison column headed "all Indian venues" is the same computation run across every men's match in the archive played at a ground in India, so the two sides of each comparison are derived identically.
First-innings means and quartiles count only completed first innings, including those closed by a declaration. Runs per over is total runs charged in an innings divided by legal deliveries. Economy charges wides and no-balls to the bowler; averages count only wickets credited to a bowler, so run-outs are excluded. Bowlers whose type could not be established are left out of the pace-and-spin split rather than assigned a category, which is why those shares do not sum to the full ball count.
Statements about heat, dew, boundary size and curatorial practice are descriptive and drawn from reporting on matches at the ground rather than derived from the data. Figures current as of 20 August 2026.