India ODI Biggest wins by wickets: Match Records
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Cricket in India8 min read
A ten-wicket win is the only result in cricket where a side's second innings tells you nothing about the side. Two batters walk out, knock off whatever is required and walk back; the other nine never pad up. Everything that made the margin happened in the first innings, which is why this list is really a list of bowling performances with a formality attached.
India have five of them in the ball-by-ball record, and the shortest is the one worth starting with. On 17 September 2023, in the Asia Cup final at the R Premadasa Stadium in Colombo, Mohammed Siraj took six wickets for 21 runs in seven overs and Sri Lanka were bowled out for 50. Hardik Pandya finished the innings with three for three. India needed 51, and Shubman Gill and Ishan Kishan made it in 6.1 overs — 263 balls of the allotted 300 unused, and a final decided before the interval.
The other four are less compressed but follow the same shape. In each case an opposition side was dismissed cheaply, and in each case India's openers were still together at the end. That second condition is rarer than it sounds: India have won 175 one-day internationals by a wickets margin in this period and only five of them without losing a batter.
India's ten-wicket wins in one-day internationals
| # | Opponent | Opponent's score | India | Overs used | Balls spare | Venue | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sri Lanka | 50 all out | 51/0 | 6.1 | 263 | R Premadasa, Colombo | 17 Sep 2023 |
| 2 | Nepal | 230 all out | 147/0 | 20.1 | 179 | Pallekele, Kandy | 4 Sep 2023 |
| 3 | England | 110 all out | 114/0 | 18.4 | 188 | The Oval, London | 12 Jul 2022 |
| 4 | Zimbabwe | 123 all out | 126/0 | 21.5 | 169 | Harare Sports Club | 15 Jun 2016 |
| 5 | Zimbabwe | 189 all out | 192/0 | 30.5 | 115 | Harare Sports Club | 18 Aug 2022 |
The Kandy match against Nepal is ranked second on balls spare but carries an asterisk: rain cut India's target to 145 from 23 overs under the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern method, so the 179 unused balls are measured against a full fifty overs rather than what India were actually given. On the reduced allocation they had 17 balls to spare.
The Asia Cup final that lasted 129 balls
Sri Lanka won the toss at Colombo and chose to bat. Jasprit Bumrah removed Kusal Perera in the first over. Siraj then took four wickets in the fourth — Pathum Nissanka, Sadeera Samarawickrama, Charith Asalanka and Dhananjaya de Silva, in that order — and bowled Dasun Shanaka in his next, so that six of the ten had gone inside six overs.
Kusal Mendis made 17, the only score above 13, and the innings ended on 50 in 15.2 overs. Siraj's seven overs cost 21 and produced six wickets, which is the best return by an India bowler in a final of any tournament. Pandya's three for three came from 2.2 overs of medium pace at the death of an innings that had no death.
India's reply took 37 balls. Gill made 27, Kishan 23 not out, and the match was finished a little more than three hours after it started. Both sides had been scheduled for a reserve day. Neither needed the rest of the afternoon. The tournament's longer history is on the Asia Cup history page, and this fixture in the fifty-over format is covered at India versus Sri Lanka in ODIs.
The Oval, 2022: Bumrah's six for 19
The England match of 12 July 2022 is the only one of the five against a full-strength top-eight side at home. Jasprit Bumrah took six for 19 from 7.2 overs, Mohammed Shami three for 31, and England were bowled out for 110 in 25.2 overs having lost five wickets for 26 inside eight.
Rohit Sharma made 76 from 58 balls and Shikhar Dhawan 31 not out, and India were home in 18.4 overs. Bumrah's figures are the best any India bowler has recorded in a one-day international in England, and the innings is the lowest England have made at home against India. That series and the fixture's longer arc sit on the India versus England in ODIs page.
Two at Harare, six years apart
Both Zimbabwe matches were played at Harare Sports Club and both were won by an entirely unfamiliar India top order. In June 2016, KL Rahul made 63 and Faiz Fazal 55 not out — Fazal's only one-day international — after Bumrah took four for 22 in a side captained by Dhoni with seven players who had fewer than ten caps between them.
In August 2022, Deepak Chahar and Axar Patel took three wickets each, and Shubman Gill's 82 and Dhawan's 81 chased 190 in 30.5 overs. India sent understrength squads to Zimbabwe in both years because the fixtures fell alongside senior tours elsewhere, which is the least glamorous reason a record entry can have and also the most common one on this particular list. The head-to-head record is at India versus Zimbabwe in ODIs.
Below ten: the nine-wicket wins
India have won by nine wickets fourteen times in this period. Three of them are worth separating from the rest because the target was large.
| Opponent | Target | India | Overs used | Venue | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Australia | 360 | 362/1 | 43.3 | Jaipur | 16 Oct 2013 |
| South Africa | 271 | 271/1 | 39.5 | Visakhapatnam | 6 Dec 2025 |
| Bangladesh | 265 | 265/1 | 40.1 | Birmingham | 15 Jun 2017 |
The Jaipur match is the outlier in the whole cluster. Australia made 359 for 5 and India chased it with 39 balls and nine wickets to spare, Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli both making hundreds in an unbroken stand that began at 176 for 1. A nine-wicket win in a chase of 360 is a different achievement from a nine-wicket win in a chase of 105, and the margin column treats them identically — which is the central weakness of ranking by wickets at all.
Why the wickets column flatters small chases
Consider two matches on this page. At Thiruvananthapuram in November 2018 India chased 105 against West Indies and won by nine wickets with 61 balls unused. At Jaipur they chased 360 and won by nine wickets with 39 balls unused. The first was a formality; the second was among the best one-day chases India have completed.
The reason the two look alike is that a wickets margin is bounded at ten and a runs margin is not. India's largest win by runs is 317, and the page for those matches can rank sixteen of them cleanly because the scale is open. Wickets compress everything above about eight into a narrow band, and balls remaining is the only tiebreak that carries information. That is why this page reports it in the table rather than in a footnote.
The same compression is what makes India's highest successful chases the more useful page for a reader interested in how good a chase actually was.
Three patterns in the five
Four of the five came in the last decade, and the fifth in 2016. There is no ten-wicket ODI win by India in the ball-by-ball record before that, which reflects a real change: a top order that can be relied on to make 120 without losing a wicket is a modern arrangement, and so is a bowling attack that dismisses sides for under 130 with any frequency.
Every one of the five was set up by a bowler taking four or more in an innings — Siraj six, Bumrah six and four, and three-wicket hauls from Chahar, Axar and Jadeja in the other two. None was set up by a batting collapse the opposition caused itself; in each case a specific spell did the damage.
Only one of the five was played in India, and it was not played by anything close to India's first-choice eleven. Four were away or at a neutral venue. Whatever this list measures, it is not home advantage. The fifty-over format's development in the country is on the ODI cricket history page, and the general background at the cricket in India hub.
Sources and method
Margins, scores, opponents, venues and dates were computed here from the Cricsheet one-day international archive (cricsheet.org, ODC-BY 1.0) by reading every delivery of India's men's ODIs and taking the recorded result from each match file. The method was validated first against this site's existing biggest wins by runs table, which it reproduced row for row, before being applied here.
That archive's India coverage runs from 29 June 2002 to the present, so this page describes the ball-by-ball era rather than the whole of India's one-day history, and readers should treat it as such. India played 331 one-day internationals before June 2002 and none of them is represented here. Afghanistan is absent from the archive altogether, so the small number of India-Afghanistan fifty-over matches is outside the scope of every table above.
Balls spare counts legal deliveries only — wides and no-balls are excluded — and is measured against the full fifty-over allocation, which is stated in the text where a match was shortened. Overs used are expressed in the conventional overs-and-balls form. A ten-wicket win means the chasing side lost no wicket, so retired-hurt and retired-out dismissals, had any occurred in these matches, would break that classification; none did. Individual bowling and batting figures in the prose were computed the same way, from the delivery record of each match. Figures are current to the archive's cut-off in the last week of August 2026.