Sawai Mansingh Stadium Pitch Report & Average Scores | Jaipur
Written and checked by CricketTakenPublished Cricket in India10 min read
Sawai Mansingh Stadium has never staged a Test match. It has held internationals since 1983 and it is the home of a founding Indian Premier League franchise, but no red-ball international has been allotted to it, so everything that can be said about the pitch comes from limited-overs cricket — ten men's one-day internationals up to 2013, a single men's T20 international in 2021, and sixty-eight IPL matches across eleven seasons.
The dominant fact in that record is the chase. Across sixty-eight IPL matches at the ground the side batting second has won forty-four and lost twenty-four. That is a two-to-one advantage, and it is the widest gap of any of the major Indian venues examined in this set. Bat-first sides have won barely a third of the games played here. The fifty-over record points the same way: seven of ten ODIs went to the chasing team, including the largest successful pursuit in India's history.
The reason is not a single dramatic property of the soil. It is the combination of a slow-ish square that quickens under lights, a modest boundary distance in front of the pavilion, and a dew-heavy Rajasthan evening in the April-to-May window when almost all the cricket here is played. What the tables below do is separate those effects from the folklore.
The ground's scoring record
All figures are computed from the Cricsheet ball-by-ball archive for the venue. First-innings averages count only completed innings — all out or the full quota of overs.
| Format | Matches in archive | Span | Mean 1st innings | Median | Runs per over | Runs per wicket |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ODI (men) | 10 | Oct 2006 – Oct 2013 | 242 | 255 | 5.07 | 34.7 |
| T20I (men) | 1 | Nov 2021 | 164 | 164 | 7.98 | 30.0 |
| IPL | 68 | Apr 2008 – May 2026 | 169 | 167 | 8.20 | 30.2 |
The ODI mean of 242 is dragged down by a cluster of very low totals from the 2006 Champions Trophy — England 125, Zimbabwe 130, Bangladesh 161 — which is why the median of 255 is the more representative figure. The runs-per-wicket figure of 30.2 in the IPL is the highest of any ground in this survey with more than twenty tournament matches, meaning wickets have been comparatively hard to take here even while the run rate has been unexceptional.
Where IPL first innings land
| Band | Innings |
|---|---|
| Under 120 | 4 |
| 120–149 | 12 |
| 150–179 | 27 |
| 180–209 | 17 |
| 210 or more | 7 |
Forty per cent of first innings at the ground finish between 150 and 179, and only seven of sixty-seven have passed 210, and every one of those came in 2023 or later — four of them in 2026 alone. The most complete collapse in the archive came in May 2023, when Rajasthan Royals were bowled out for 59 in 10.3 overs chasing Royal Challengers Bangalore's 171 for 5, losing by 112 runs on their own ground.
Eleven seasons of IPL scoring
| Season | Matches | Mean 1st innings |
|---|---|---|
| 2008 | 7 | 158 |
| 2010 | 3 | 152 |
| 2011 | 7 | 143 |
| 2012 | 8 | 167 |
| 2013 | 8 | 154 |
| 2018 | 6 | 163 |
| 2019 | 7 | 163 |
| 2023 | 5 | 172 |
| 2024 | 5 | 187 |
| 2025 | 7 | 198 |
| 2026 | 4 | 226 |
The 2011 mean of 143 and the 2026 mean of 226 are eighty-three runs apart. Jaipur's absence from the schedule between 2013 and 2018 splits the series into two eras, and the second is unrecognisable from the first. In April 2026 Rajasthan Royals made 228 for 6 and lost to Sunrisers Hyderabad's 229 for 5; two weeks later Gujarat Titans defended 229 by 77 runs. Both of those scorecards would have been the ground record at any point before 2023.
Some caution is warranted on the last row: four matches is a small sample and 2026 was a high-scoring season everywhere. The 2024 and 2025 figures, on five and seven matches, are the more solid evidence that the square has genuinely sped up.
Toss and result: the chase advantage
| Format | Chose to bat | Chose to field | Bat-first side won | Chasing side won |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ODI (men) | 4 | 6 | 3 | 7 |
| T20I (men) | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| IPL | 28 | 40 | 24 | 44 |
Twenty-four wins from sixty-eight for the side batting first is a 35 per cent return, and it holds up across eras rather than being concentrated in one. Winning the toss itself has been worth something but not everything: toss-winners have won thirty-eight of sixty-eight, and the twenty-eight captains who chose to bat were mostly making a defensible call on a surface that used to be slow in the afternoon.
The largest total successfully chased at the ground in any format is India's 362 for 1 against Australia on 16 October 2013, in reply to 359 for 5. Rohit Sharma made 141 not out from 123 balls, Virat Kohli 100 not out from 52 and Shikhar Dhawan 95; India got there in 43.3 overs. It remains India's highest successful one-day chase and, at more than seven an over over the full innings, the most extreme scoring day the venue has seen. The men's fifty-over record it belongs to is traced in the guide to ODI cricket in India.
In the IPL the biggest chase is 229 for 5 by Sunrisers Hyderabad in April 2026, and the smallest total ever defended here is 145, by Kolkata Knight Riders in April 2013.
Pace against spin
Wickets are credited to the bowler only for caught, bowled, lbw, stumped and hit wicket, so run-outs are excluded, and a small number of occasional bowlers are left unclassified.
| Format | Pace wickets | Spin wickets | Spin share of overs | Pace average | Spin average | Pace economy | Spin economy |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ODI (men) | 84 | 35 | 31% | 39.0 | 38.1 | 5.29 | 4.72 |
| IPL | 441 | 210 | 32% | 33.0 | 31.6 | 8.52 | 7.88 |
What stands out is how flat the difference is. In fifty-over cricket pace and spin have averaged 39.0 and 38.1 — effectively identical — and in the IPL 33.0 and 31.6. Jaipur has not been a ground where one discipline is obviously the answer, which is unusual in India and is the strongest argument against calling it a spinner's pitch.
Two names dominate the tournament record here. Siddharth Trivedi took 36 IPL wickets at the ground, more than anyone else, bowling medium pace into the surface for the Royals across their early seasons. Shane Warne, who captained the 2008 title-winning side, took 20. The single best return is Sohail Tanvir's 6 for 14 from four overs against Chennai Super Kings in May 2008, which was for years the best analysis in the tournament's history. Sandeep Sharma's 5 for 18 against Mumbai Indians in April 2024 and James Faulkner's 5 for 20 against Sunrisers in April 2013 are the only other five-wicket hauls in the archive.
Phases of a twenty-over innings
| Phase | Runs per over | Balls per wicket |
|---|---|---|
| Overs 1–6 | 7.82 | 29.8 |
| Overs 7–15 | 7.82 | 25.0 |
| Overs 16–20 | 9.49 | 13.8 |
The powerplay and middle-overs rates are identical to two decimal places, which is a fair summary of Jaipur: nothing about the first fifteen overs punishes either side. The powerplay is also the safest phase for batting anywhere in this survey at 29.8 balls per wicket, so the new ball does very little. Everything happens at the death, where the rate jumps by more than a run and a half and wickets fall twice as fast.
Boundaries make up 17.0 per cent of deliveries and a third of balls are dots. Ajinkya Rahane's 1,115 runs are the most by any batter at the ground, ahead of Shane Watson's 875 and Jos Buttler's 832; Vaibhav Suryavanshi has made two hundreds here, in April 2025 and April 2026, before turning twenty.
Conditions, season and dew
The stadium was built in 1969 and hosted its first international in October 1983, an ODI against Pakistan. It sits on the edge of the Thar's rain shadow, and the practical consequence is a very dry March-to-May window with hard, fast outfields and no realistic prospect of rain interference, followed by a monsoon break that removes the venue from the calendar entirely. The reasons the Indian season is shaped this way are set out in the guide to the monsoon and the cricket season.
Evening dew is the single most important conditional factor here and it is the most credible explanation for the chase bias. Jaipur's night-time humidity rises sharply after sunset in April and May, the ball becomes hard to grip, and finger spin in particular loses its purchase in the second innings. That is consistent with what the phase table shows: spin is economical through the middle overs but not a wicket-taking threat, and the pace bowlers who succeed here do so at the death rather than with the new ball.
Afternoon fixtures behave differently and the archive contains few of them, so the tables should be read as describing evening cricket in the Indian hot season. How Indian surfaces vary across the country is covered in Indian pitch types and conditions.
Four conclusions the raw averages hide
- The chase bias is real but it is a dew effect, not a pitch effect. Nothing in the innings-phase or bowling-type data suggests the surface itself deteriorates. The advantage arrives with the moisture.
- This is the hardest well-used ground in the survey to take a wicket on. Thirty runs per wicket in the IPL is the highest figure of any venue here with a substantial tournament sample, and 29.8 balls per powerplay wicket is the most forgiving new-ball phase of all ten.
- The venue's international career has effectively stopped. No men's ODI has been played here since October 2013 and only one men's T20 international, in November 2021. Anyone reading the ODI averages is reading a description of a surface as it was more than a decade ago.
- The absence of a Test is a fact about the ground, not about the pitch. Jaipur has never been on the red-ball international roster despite holding internationals since 1983, and the survey of Indian Test cricket grounds explains how that roster has actually been assembled.
For ranked lists of the highest scores, best bowling and leading aggregates at the venue, see the Sawai Mansingh Stadium records page. The ground's standing among the country's grounds is covered in India's iconic cricket stadiums, and the wider national picture at cricket in India. For a venue that shows the opposite pattern — a bat-first record and a spin-dominated red-ball history — compare the Holkar Stadium pitch report.
Sources and method
Every scoring, toss, phase and bowler-type figure here is computed from the Cricsheet ball-by-ball archive (cricsheet.org, ODC-BY 1.0) as read in August 2026. That archive holds ten men's ODIs at the ground from October 2006, one men's T20 international from November 2021 and sixty-eight IPL matches from April 2008. It does not contain the ground's earliest internationals, including the October 1983 ODI against Pakistan, so match counts on this page are counts within the archive rather than a complete fixture history. No women's international is recorded at the venue in the archive.
Means, medians, distribution bands, phase splits and toss outcomes are calculated from the deliveries rather than quoted. Wickets are attributed to bowlers only for the dismissal types a bowler earns, so the pace and spin columns will not always sum to the format total; the classification of bowlers into pace and spin is an editorial judgement by name, and the handful who could not be classified with confidence are excluded rather than guessed.
The 1969 construction date, the October 1983 first international and the ground's seating — published variously between roughly 23,000 and 30,000 — come from Rajasthan Cricket Association and ESPNcricinfo ground information. The description of dew and seasonal humidity is a reading of the pattern in the data alongside general climate information for the city; it is offered as the most plausible explanation for the chase bias rather than as a measured quantity.