India 2016 T20 World Cup Squad, Results & Stats

India hosted the sixth World Twenty20 in March and April 2016 and went out of it in the last over of a semi-final at the Wankhede, chased down by a batter who had not been in the West Indies squad a week earlier. Five matches, three won, and the two defeats came in the games that decided whether India would still be playing in April. The tournament they had staged was won by the West Indies, who beat England at Eden Gardens on 3 April with four sixes in the final over.

The arithmetic of India's qualification is the odd part. They won three Super 10 matches and finished second in the group, and their net run rate at the end of it was minus 0.305 — the only negative figure among the four semi-finalists. That single number is the residue of 15 March at Jamtha, where New Zealand made 126 for 7 and bowled India out for 79. Everything after that was played with no margin: lose again and the hosts were out of their own tournament with a week of it left.

Virat Kohli scored 273 runs in five innings, was dismissed twice, and was named player of the tournament. His five scores were 23, 55 not out, 24, 82 not out and 89 not out, which is a strange shape for a leading scorer — one substantial innings in the two games India lost badly enough to matter, and three unbeaten fifties in the ones they had to win. The rest of India's top order made 264 runs between them across the same five matches.

Nagpur to Mumbai: India's five matches

Date	Stage	Venue	Opponent	Scores	Result	Player of the match
15 Mar	Super 10	Nagpur	New Zealand	New Zealand 126/7; India 79	New Zealand won by 47 runs	Mitchell Santner
19 Mar	Super 10	Eden Gardens	Pakistan	Pakistan 118/5 (18); India 119/4	India won by 6 wickets	Virat Kohli
23 Mar	Super 10	Bengaluru	Bangladesh	India 146/7; Bangladesh 145/9	India won by 1 run	R Ashwin
27 Mar	Super 10	Mohali	Australia	Australia 160/6; India 161/4	India won by 6 wickets	Virat Kohli
31 Mar	Semi-final	Wankhede	West Indies	India 192/2; West Indies 196/3	West Indies won by 7 wickets	Lendl Simmons

Four of the five were played on grounds India knew intimately, and the fifth — Kolkata — was not on the original schedule at all. The Pakistan fixture had been allotted to Dharamsala and was moved when the Himachal Pradesh authorities said they could not provide the security the visiting side required.

Second place on a negative run rate

Team	Played	Won	Lost	Net run rate	Points
New Zealand	4	4	0	+1.900	8
India	4	3	1	−0.305	6
Australia	4	2	2	+0.233	4
Pakistan	4	1	3	−0.093	2
Bangladesh	4	0	4	−1.805	0

New Zealand won all four without ever making 150. India's three wins came by six wickets, one run and six wickets — margins that add almost nothing to a run rate — while the single defeat cost 47 runs in a low-scoring game, which is the most expensive kind. Had India and Australia finished level on four points, the qualification would have gone the other way; the group was decided instead by the result in Mohali, so the arithmetic never had to be used.

Jamtha, 15 March: nine wickets to spin

New Zealand batted first on a dry surface at the Vidarbha Cricket Association ground and did not enjoy it either — 126 for 7, with Corey Anderson's 34 from 42 balls the highest score in the match by either side. India's five bowlers took a wicket each and none conceded more than 32.

Kane Williamson then opened his bowling with Nathan McCullum's off spin and followed it with Mitchell Santner and Ish Sodhi, a decision that reads as obvious now and did not at the time. Santner took 4 for 11 in four overs, Sodhi 3 for 18, McCullum 2 for 15. Nine of the ten India wickets fell to spin. Kohli made 23 from 27, MS Dhoni 30 from 30, and the other nine batters made 26 between them. The 79 is India's third-lowest completed total in the format, behind the 74 at Melbourne in 2008 and the 76 at Trent Bridge, and it sits in the wider list of India's lowest T20I totals as the only one made in a home World Cup.

The defeat also reframed the tournament for the host. India had picked two frontline spinners and a bank of part-timers on the assumption that Indian pitches would be their advantage. On the evening it mattered most, a New Zealand side with three slow bowlers used that advantage better.

Eden Gardens, 19 March: 119 in fifteen and a bit

A storm delayed the start in Kolkata and took two overs off each innings. Pakistan made 118 for 5 from their eighteen, Shoaib Malik's 26 from 16 the fastest of it, and lost three wickets in the last four overs. India used six bowlers and five of them took a wicket; Suresh Raina's single over cost four.

The chase was Kohli's. India were 23 for 3 inside five overs — Rohit Sharma, Shikhar Dhawan and Raina all gone — and Kohli then made 55 not out from 37 balls with seven fours, adding 61 with Yuvraj Singh and finishing it with thirteen balls unused. It was the sort of innings that became his signature over the following fortnight: no early hitting, a strike rate that climbed rather than started high, and the chase completed with overs in hand. The longer arc of these fixtures is set out in the guide to the India–Pakistan rivalry, and the ground's own record is on the Eden Gardens records page.

Bengaluru, 23 March: two runs, three balls, three wickets

India batted first at the Chinnaswamy and made 146 for 7, a total that looked twenty short. Raina's 30 from 23 was the highest score; six India batters reached double figures and none passed 30. Mustafizur Rahman and Al-Amin Hossain took two each.

Bangladesh were 145 for 6 with three balls left and two runs needed. Hardik Pandya was bowling. Mushfiqur Rahim, who had already celebrated, holed out; Mahmudullah, next ball, did the same; Shuvagata Hom was run out off the last delivery going for the winning single, with Dhoni gloving the ball and completing the run-out with one bail already removed. Three wickets fell without a run being added.

Ashwin took the match award for 2 for 20, and the figures make the case: India's spin pair of Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja bowled eight overs for 42 and four wickets. The finish is remembered for the last over, but the game was kept alive by the eight overs that preceded it. Pandya's international career is set out on his player page; Ashwin's is on his.

Mohali, 27 March: 82 not out, and qualification

Australia batted and made 160 for 6, the highest total India conceded in the group. Aaron Finch made 43, Usman Khawaja 26 from 16, Glenn Maxwell 31. Pandya took 2 for 36 and every other bowler one apiece.

India needed 161 to reach the semi-final and were 49 for 3 in the eighth over. Kohli made 82 not out from 51 balls with nine fours and two sixes, put on 45 with Yuvraj Singh and 67 unbroken with Dhoni, and India got there with five balls to spare. Kohli faced 51 of the 115 deliveries India used and scored just over half their runs. Australia went out; New Zealand had already qualified; India were through on six points and a negative run rate.

Wankhede, 31 March: 192, and a batter who arrived two days early

India's semi-final innings was the best batting of their tournament. Rohit Sharma made 43 from 31, Ajinkya Rahane — playing his only match of the competition, brought in for Dhawan — made 40 from 35, and Kohli 89 not out from 47 with eleven fours. India lost two wickets in twenty overs and made 192, their highest total of the fortnight by 46 runs.

West Indies chased it with two balls left. Johnson Charles made 52 from 36 and Andre Russell 43 from 20, but the innings belonged to Lendl Simmons, who was not in the original squad and had flown in as a replacement for the injured Andre Fletcher two days before the match. He made 82 not out from 51 and was caught twice off deliveries ruled no-balls — once off Ashwin, once off Pandya. Dhoni said afterwards that the overstepping was the only part of the night that disappointed him.

Whether the no-balls decided it is arguable; Russell's 43 from 20 at the end was hit off legitimate deliveries, and India's bowlers conceded 20 fours and 11 sixes across the innings, the most they gave up in any match of the tournament. What is not arguable is that a total of 192 at the Wankhede was not enough, and that the last home World Cup semi-final India had lost before this one was in 1987.

Kohli's 273, and the three who never played

Player	Matches	Runs	Balls	Highest	Wickets	Best
Virat Kohli	5	273	186	89*	1	1/15
MS Dhoni (capt, wk)	5	89	70	30	—	—
Rohit Sharma	5	88	82	43	—	—
Yuvraj Singh	4	52	52	24	1	1/19
Shikhar Dhawan	4	43	52	23	—	—
Suresh Raina	4	41	33	30	3	1/4
Ajinkya Rahane	1	40	35	40	—	—
Hardik Pandya	5	16	14	15	5	2/29
R Ashwin	5	15	22	10	4	2/20
Ravindra Jadeja	5	12	11	12	4	2/22
Ashish Nehra	5	0	4	0	5	1/20
Jasprit Bumrah	5	0	2	0*	4	1/15

Twelve of the fifteen played. Harbhajan Singh, Mohammed Shami and Pawan Negi did not get a game, and Negi — picked on the strength of an IPL season and two T20Is — has not played an international since. Rahane's single appearance came in the semi-final.

Ashish Nehra, at 36, bowled nineteen overs across the five matches for 113 runs and five wickets, an economy of 5.95 that was the best of any India bowler who bowled more than six overs. It was his last major tournament. At the other end of it, Jasprit Bumrah played his first, going for 7.65 an over but conceding fewer than eight in four of the five games; the shape of what followed is on his player page.

What the five matches add up to

India's bowling was not the problem the semi-final scoreline suggests. In the four group matches they conceded 126, 118, 145 and 160 — an average of 137 in games where the opposition batted a full twenty only three times. The 196 at the Wankhede was 36 more than they had given up in any other innings, and it came in the one match where the opposition had a settled pair going at ten an over from the eighth.

The batting was the problem, and specifically the batting around Kohli. Excluding him, India's other batters made 264 runs from 273 balls across five matches — a strike rate of 96.7. In a tournament won by a side that hit 11 sixes in a semi-final chase, India's non-Kohli batting scored at under a run a ball. The three totals of 79, 146 and 119 all came from top orders that lost early wickets and had no one able to accelerate through the middle overs except the man at number three.

That gap is the reason 2016 reads differently from 2014, when India reached the final unbeaten with a spin attack that strangled the opposition, and differently again from the 2021 campaign, which failed at the other end — with the batting intact and the first two matches lost outright. The broader arc from 2007 onwards is covered in the guide to India's T20 international history, and every edition sits in the T20 World Cup archive. India's place in the wider home game is on the cricket in India hub.

Sources and method

Match scores, individual innings, bowling figures and dismissal details on this page were compiled from ball-by-ball records of the 2016 World Twenty20 and checked against the published scorecards for each of India's five matches. The Super 10 Group 2 standings, including net run rates, are taken from the tournament's official points table.

Squad composition follows the fifteen named by the BCCI selection committee in February 2016. Player aggregates cover only India's five matches in the competition; the tournament-wide leading run-scorer figure quoted for Kohli is his aggregate across those same five innings, in which he was dismissed twice, giving the average of 136.50 that was reported at the time.

Where a match description mentions a decision or a piece of context — the venue change from Dharamsala, the no-balls in the semi-final, Simmons's late call-up — that is drawn from contemporary match reports rather than computed from the scorecard, and is described as such. Records current as of 20 August 2026.