India T20I Highest opening partnerships: Match Records

Two India opening stands share the record at 165, and the pair of them could hardly be less alike. The first came at the Holkar Stadium in Indore on 22 December 2017, when Rohit Sharma made 118 from 43 balls and KL Rahul 89 from 49 against Sri Lanka; the stand was broken in the thirteenth over and India finished on 260 for 5. The second came at Lauderhill in Florida on 12 August 2023, when Yashasvi Jaiswal and Shubman Gill knocked off a West Indies total of 178 without being separated until the sixteenth over, Jaiswal ending on 84 and Gill on 77.

One was a demolition; the other was a chase managed to its conclusion. Both are worth 165 in the ledger, which is the honest limitation of a partnership record — it counts runs, not the situation that produced them.

The full ranked list of India's largest first-wicket stands in men's T20 internationals follows. Fourteen century opening stands have been recorded across more than 270 India innings in the format, and 58 have reached fifty, so a hundred for the first wicket remains roughly a once-a-year event even in an era of much heavier scoring.

India's highest T20I opening partnerships

Runs	Openers (score in the innings)	Opponent	Venue	Date	India total	Result
165	Rohit Sharma 118, KL Rahul 89	Sri Lanka	Holkar Stadium, Indore	22 Dec 2017	260/5	Won by 88 runs
165	Yashasvi Jaiswal 84, Shubman Gill 77	West Indies	Lauderhill, Florida	12 Aug 2023	179/1	Won by 9 wickets
160	Rohit Sharma 97, Shikhar Dhawan 74	Ireland	Malahide, Dublin	27 Jun 2018	208/5	Won by 76 runs
158	Rohit Sharma 80, Shikhar Dhawan 80	New Zealand	Arun Jaitley Stadium, Delhi	1 Nov 2017	202/3	Won by 53 runs
156*	Yashasvi Jaiswal 93*, Shubman Gill 58*	Zimbabwe	Harare Sports Club	13 Jul 2024	156/0	Won by 10 wickets
136	Gautam Gambhir 58, Virender Sehwag 68	England	Kingsmead, Durban	19 Sep 2007	218/4	Won by 18 runs
135	Rohit Sharma 71, KL Rahul 91	West Indies	Wankhede Stadium, Mumbai	11 Dec 2019	240/3	Won by 67 runs
123	Rohit Sharma 111*, Shikhar Dhawan 43	West Indies	Ekana Stadium, Lucknow	6 Nov 2018	195/2	Won by 71 runs
118	Rohit Sharma 85, Shikhar Dhawan 31	Bangladesh	Rajkot	7 Nov 2019	154/2	Won by 8 wickets
117	KL Rahul 65, Rohit Sharma 55	New Zealand	Ranchi	19 Nov 2021	155/3	Won by 7 wickets
111	Rohit Sharma 44, Ishan Kishan 89	Sri Lanka	Ekana Stadium, Lucknow	24 Feb 2022	199/2	Won by 62 runs
105	Abhishek Sharma 74, Shubman Gill 47	Pakistan	Dubai	21 Sep 2025	174/4	Won by 6 wickets
103*	KL Rahul 47*, Mandeep Singh 52*	Zimbabwe	Harare Sports Club	20 Jun 2016	103/0	Won by 10 wickets
103	Yashasvi Jaiswal 100, Ruturaj Gaikwad 25	Nepal	Hangzhou	3 Oct 2023	202/4	Won by 23 runs

An asterisk marks a stand that was never broken. Individual figures are the batter's score in the innings, not their contribution inside the partnership — Rahul's 91 at the Wankhede and Kishan's 89 at Lucknow were both made mostly after the opening stand had ended.

The record stood still for a decade

India's first T20 international, at Johannesburg on 1 December 2006, opened with Virender Sehwag and Sachin Tendulkar. They put on 17. Tendulkar never played another one.

Nine months later, at the inaugural World Twenty20 in South Africa, Sehwag and Gautam Gambhir made 76 against New Zealand and then 136 against England at Kingsmead three days after that. The Durban stand set up 218 for 4 — a total that in 2007 looked absurd and still won the match by only 18 runs, because England replied with 200 for 6. That was the innings in which Yuvraj Singh took six sixes off a Stuart Broad over, which is why almost nobody remembers the opening stand that preceded it.

The 136 then survived for ten years and one month. India played 78 T20 internationals in that period without an opening pair beating it. Sehwag and Gambhir were separated by injury and selection; Rohit Sharma spent several of those years batting in the middle order; Ajinkya Rahane, Murali Vijay, Robin Uthappa and Suresh Raina all opened at one point or another without settling there.

The block was broken twice in eight weeks in late 2017. Rohit and Shikhar Dhawan made 158 in Delhi on 1 November, both finishing on exactly 80. Rohit and Rahul then made 165 at Indore on 22 December. Since then the mark has been equalled once and never beaten.

Rohit Sharma's name on half the list

Rohit appears in seven of the fourteen entries above, alongside three different partners — Dhawan four times, Rahul twice, Ishan Kishan once. No other India batter is in more than four.

That is partly longevity, and partly the fact that he was moved up to open at almost exactly the moment India began treating the first six overs as a scoring opportunity rather than a survival exercise. His 111 not out at Lucknow in November 2018 and 118 at Indore are the only two hundreds by an India opener inside a record stand on this list; his 71 from 34 balls at the Wankhede in December 2019 was the fastest scoring of any of them, and he was out having made more than half the partnership in a little over eleven overs.

The Rohit–Dhawan pairing is the most productive single combination on the list, with four entries between 2017 and 2019 — 160, 158, 123 and 118. Their method was unusual for the era: Dhawan generally took the second-highest share and rarely accelerated late, while Rohit either went past a hundred or was dismissed trying. His career is covered in more detail on the Rohit Sharma profile, and Dhawan's white-ball work on the Shikhar Dhawan profile.

The two stands nobody broke

Two entries carry asterisks, and both ended a match rather than beginning one.

At Harare on 20 June 2016, Zimbabwe made 99 for 9 and KL Rahul and Mandeep Singh knocked off the target inside fourteen overs, Mandeep 52 not out and Rahul 47 not out. It is one of only two India T20 internationals won by ten wickets.

At the same ground on 13 July 2024, Jaiswal and Gill did it again on a larger scale: Zimbabwe 152 for 7, India 156 without loss, Jaiswal 93 not out from 53 balls and Gill 58 not out. A ten-wicket win in a T20 international requires the openers to bat the whole chase, so an unbroken opening stand is the only way it can happen — which makes 156 both India's biggest unbroken opening partnership and the largest total they have chased without losing a wicket.

Setting a total against finishing a chase

Eight of the fourteen stands came batting first and six in the second innings, and the two groups look different.

The first-innings stands are the bigger ones on average and they produced India's heaviest scores of their respective eras: 260 for 5 at Indore, 240 for 3 at the Wankhede, 208 for 5 at Malahide, 202 for 3 in Delhi. Where India batted first after a hundred-plus opening stand, they went on to win every time, and by margins of 18 to 88 runs.

The second-innings stands cluster tightly, because a chase caps the runs available. Four of them — Harare 2016, Harare 2024, Rajkot 2019 and Ranchi 2021 — were pursuits of totals between 99 and 154, where the stand simply consumed the target. The Lauderhill 165 and the Dubai 105 against Pakistan are the exceptions: both were chases of a competitive total in which the openers did the bulk of the work and left the middle order a formality.

Nothing on the list came in a defeat. That is not the boast it looks like — a hundred-run opening stand in a twenty-over match is an enormous head start, and the wider India T20 international history shows how rarely it is squandered. The broader story of how the format took hold in the country sits in the cricket in India hub.

The turnover after Rohit

Rohit and Dhawan stopped opening together in 2021, and Rohit played his last T20 international in 2024. The pairs that followed are represented here by Jaiswal and Gill, who hold two of the top five entries, and by Abhishek Sharma, whose 105 with Gill against Pakistan in Dubai on 21 September 2025 is the most recent hundred-run opening stand on the list.

The 2026 T20 World Cup, which India won at home, produced a different shape again. Sanju Samson opened in the final at Ahmedabad on 8 March 2026 and put on 98 with Abhishek Sharma inside seven and a bit overs before Abhishek was dismissed for 52 from 21 balls. That stand is not quite big enough for the table, but it is the fastest scoring of any India opening stand of 90 or more — an indication that the ceiling on this record is now set by how long a pair survives rather than how fast they score. Samson's rise is covered on the Sanju Samson profile and Abhishek's on the Abhishek Sharma profile.

Four things the table does not say

The record has been equalled but not beaten for eight and a half years while every other India T20 batting record has moved. India's highest T20I team totals and their most sixes in a T20I innings have both been reset since 2023. The opening-stand record has not, which suggests the modern method — attack from the first ball and accept the dismissals that come with it — actively works against very large first-wicket stands.

Neither Australia nor South Africa appears in the table at all. England and Pakistan appear once each; West Indies three times and Sri Lanka, New Zealand and Zimbabwe twice each. India's largest opening stand against Australia is 97, by Rohit and Dhawan at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in January 2016, and against South Africa 97, by Ruturaj Gaikwad and Ishan Kishan at Visakhapatnam in June 2022 — both short of the fourteen listed.

Seven of the fourteen were made in India, at Indore, Delhi, Mumbai, Lucknow twice, Rajkot and Ranchi. Of the seven away and neutral entries, two were at Harare, which accounts for both of the unbroken stands.

Every entry belongs to a partnership of exactly two players, which sounds obvious until you notice that the record for any wicket in India's T20 internationals is not held by openers at all. The highest partnerships for any wicket page covers the middle-order stands that beat it.

Sources and method

The ranking is computed from public ball-by-ball records of men's T20 internationals involving India, from the format's first India appearance in December 2006 to matches completed before 1 August 2026. A first-wicket partnership is measured from the opening delivery of an India innings to the first dismissal in it, and a stand is marked unbroken where no wicket fell.

Individual scores quoted in the table are each batter's total for the innings, taken from the same records; where a batter went on after the stand ended, that is stated in the text rather than folded into the partnership figure. Match margins and totals are as recorded in the scorecards.

Records of this kind move. The Indore and Lauderhill stands of 165 were the joint highest as of 19 August 2026, and the count of century opening stands is accurate to the same date. Nothing on this page is an estimate, and where a figure could not be derived from the ball-by-ball record it has been left out rather than approximated.