IPL Lowest Totals Defended: All-Time Records

Punjab Kings were bowled out for 111 in 15.3 overs at the Maharaja Yadavindra Singh Stadium at Mullanpur on 15 April 2025 and won the match by sixteen runs. Kolkata Knight Riders, who had taken those ten wickets in under sixteen overs, were themselves out for 95 in 15.1. Yuzvendra Chahal took four for 28 and Marco Jansen three for 17; Angkrish Raghuvanshi's 37 from 28 balls was the only Kolkata innings to pass twenty. No side has protected a smaller full-length total in the Indian Premier League.

Defences of this kind are extremely rare and they are not a matter of good bowling alone. A total of 111 has been posted in a completed IPL innings dozens of times; it has been defended once. The distinction on this page is between what a low score is worth on average — very little — and the specific combination of surface, attack and second-innings panic that occasionally makes it enough.

Five of the eight smallest successful defences came before 2014, at a time when 130 was a competitive score. What makes Punjab's 111 remarkable is its date. It was made in the third season after the impact-player rule deepened batting orders, and in a summer when three clubs passed 240 between them six times.

Every full-length total under 135 successfully defended

#	Total	Team	Opponent made	City	Date	Margin
1	111/10	Punjab Kings	95 all out	Mohali	15 Apr 2025	16 runs
2	116/9	Chennai Super Kings	92/8	Durban	20 May 2009	24 runs
3	118/10	Sunrisers Hyderabad	87 all out	Mumbai	24 Apr 2018	31 runs
4	119/8	Kings XI Punjab	116/7	Durban	29 Apr 2009	3 runs
5	119/8	Sunrisers Hyderabad	108 all out	Pune	17 Apr 2013	11 runs
6	120/9	Mumbai Indians	119/6	Pune	3 May 2012	1 run
7	125/7	Punjab Kings	120/7	Sharjah	25 Sep 2021	5 runs
8	126/8	Royal Challengers Bangalore	112/8	Chennai	21 May 2008	14 runs
9	126/6	Sunrisers Hyderabad	104 all out	Hyderabad	5 Apr 2013	22 runs
10	126/7	Kings XI Punjab	114 all out	Dubai	24 Oct 2020	12 runs
11	126/9	Royal Challengers Bangalore	108 all out	Lucknow	1 May 2023	18 runs
12	129/7	Deccan Chargers	74 all out	Kochi	27 Apr 2011	55 runs
13	129/9	Pune Warriors	101/9	Mumbai	6 Apr 2012	28 runs
14	129/8	Mumbai Indians	128/6	Hyderabad	21 May 2017	1 run
15	130/8	Delhi Capitals	125/6	Ahmedabad	2 May 2023	5 runs
16	131/10	Kolkata Knight Riders	49 all out	Kolkata	23 Apr 2017	82 runs
17	132/7	Kochi Tuskers Kerala	126/9	Kolkata	20 Apr 2011	6 runs
18	132/7	Deccan Chargers	123/9	Hyderabad	20 May 2012	9 runs
19	132/9	Kings XI Punjab	109 all out	Abu Dhabi	26 Apr 2014	23 runs
20	132/6	Sunrisers Hyderabad	119 all out	Hyderabad	26 Apr 2018	13 runs
21	133/6	Kolkata Knight Riders	110 all out	Kolkata	13 May 2008	23 runs
22	133/8	Royal Challengers Bangalore	58 all out	Cape Town	18 Apr 2009	75 runs

Sunrisers Hyderabad appear four times, more than any other club, and three of those defences came at scores under 127. That is not an accident of sample size — Sunrisers spent the years from 2013 to 2018 building a side around Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Rashid Khan and Siddarth Kaul, and the Sunrisers Hyderabad hub covers a period when they routinely won matches from positions no other club could hold.

Reduced-overs defences are a separate category

Two smaller defences exist in a raw sort and neither belongs above. Royal Challengers Bangalore made 106 for 2 in an eight-over match at the Chinnaswamy on 18 May 2013 and held Chennai to 82 for 6; Kings XI Punjab made 106 for 6 in a ten-over match at Chandigarh on 13 May 2015 and held Royal Challengers to 84 for 6. Both were rain-shortened before the first ball, so 106 in eight overs is a rate of 13.25 an over, not a low total in any meaningful sense.

The same reasoning excludes the Duckworth-Lewis results where the chase was cut short: Rajasthan defending 153 in a seventeen-over reply at Jaipur in April 2018, Chennai defending 185 at Centurion in 2009, and Lucknow defending 209 against Royal Challengers at the Ekana on 7 May 2026. A defence counts here only when both sides had the full twenty overs available.

What a total is actually worth

First-innings total	Matches	Defended	Success rate
60-99	24	0	0%
100-119	52	5	10%
120-139	129	30	23%
140-159	242	66	27%
160-179	315	147	47%
180-199	220	132	60%
200-219	132	93	70%
220-239	54	45	83%
240 and above	27	23	85%

Twenty-four full-length innings have closed under 100 and none has been defended. The five defences in the 100-119 band are Punjab's 111, Chennai's 116 and the three 118 and 119 totals in the list — a one-in-ten proposition. The curve does not turn genuinely favourable until 170, and the IPL highest successful chases page describes the other end of the same distribution, where 240 has been run down.

The sharpest step is between 159 and 180. A side making 175 wins roughly half the time; a side making 155 wins roughly a quarter. Twenty runs across the same eleven overs of batting is worth about twenty percentage points of win probability, which is a more useful figure for reading a first innings than any all-time list.

How the small defences were won

Three patterns cover almost every entry in the table.

The first is a spinner bowling through the middle overs at a run rate the chasing side cannot accept. Chahal's four for 28 at Mullanpur in 2025, Muttiah Muralitharan's two for eight and Ravichandran Ashwin's two for 13 at Kingsmead in 2009, and Rashid Khan's two for 11 at the Wankhede in 2018 all fit. A target of 115 needs 5.75 an over, and a spinner going at four across four overs forces the required rate above nine before the death.

The second is early seam movement. Chennai's defence of 116 at Durban in 2009 and Punjab's of 126 at Dubai in 2020 both came on surfaces where the new ball did enough for the first six overs to take three wickets, after which the chase was rebuilding rather than chasing.

The third is simply a collapse — the case where the defending total is incidental. Kolkata's 131 against Royal Challengers in April 2017 produced a margin of 82 runs, and Royal Challengers' 133 at Cape Town in 2009 a margin of 75. Neither was a defence in the ordinary sense; those matches belong more naturally on the IPL lowest team totals page, where both losing innings appear near the top.

Margins: how close these matches were

Two of the twenty-two were won by a single run — Mumbai's 120 against Pune Warriors at the Subrata Roy Sahara Stadium in May 2012, and Mumbai's 129 against Rising Pune Supergiant at Uppal on 21 May 2017. The second of those was the final. Mumbai were 129 for 8 after twenty overs, Pune finished on 128 for 6, and it remains the only IPL title decided by a single run. The 2017 season page covers the campaign.

Nine of the twenty-two were decided by fewer than fifteen runs. That is the shape of a genuine low-total defence: the bowling side is never comfortable, and the margin reflects the fact that the chasing side got close before running out of either wickets or overs.

At the other extreme, the three largest margins in the list — 82, 75 and 55 runs — all belong to matches where the chase collapsed, and all three took place before 2018.

Eras: when low defences were possible

Nine of the twenty-two came in the seasons from 2008 to 2013, when the competition average first-innings total sat well below 160. Only four have come since 2020, and one of those is Punjab's 111.

The reason is arithmetic. As par has risen, a side dismissed for 120 is now facing an opponent with more batting depth and a stronger case for taking risks early, because the alternative — a controlled chase — no longer offers the same margin for error against modern death bowling. The 2025 season page describes the campaign in which the record defence happened, and the Punjab Kings hub covers a club that has three entries in this list, more than any side except Sunrisers.

Four points the ranked table leaves out:

• No side has defended a total under 111 in a full-length IPL match, and no side has defended under 100 in a match of any length.
• Kingsmead in Durban hosted two of the twenty-two inside a month in 2009, from the fifteen IPL matches the ground has staged in all.
• Of the twenty-two defences, seventeen ended with the chasing side dismissed rather than surviving twenty overs short of the target.
• The clubs that no longer exist — Deccan Chargers, Pune Warriors, Kochi Tuskers Kerala — account for four entries between them from 114 combined matches, a higher rate than any current franchise.

The Chennai Super Kings hub and the Mumbai Indians hub carry the two clubs with the most one-run finishes in this list, the Indian Premier League index lists every season, and the cricket in India hub sets the tournament in its domestic context.

Sources and method

All figures are recomputed from the Cricsheet ball-by-ball archive (cricsheet.org, ODC-BY 1.0), covering all 1,243 IPL matches from 18 April 2008 to 31 May 2026. A defence is recorded when the side batting first won by a runs margin; wins by wickets are chases and do not appear.

The eligibility rule for the ranked table, applied without exception, is that both innings must have had the full twenty overs available at the start of the match. Innings shortened before the toss and matches whose second innings was cut by Duckworth-Lewis are excluded, and the four principal cases are named individually in the second section so a reader can check the boundary rather than take it on trust. The win-rate table applies the same rule and additionally requires the first innings to have been completed, so a first innings interrupted by rain is out of both.

Bowling figures in the prose are wickets and runs conceded from the same archive, with wides and no-balls charged to the bowler and run-outs credited to none. Team names follow the season in which the match was played; the club counts in the prose merge Kings XI Punjab with Punjab Kings and Royal Challengers Bangalore with Royal Challengers Bengaluru. Season labels are the calendar year of the tournament. All figures close with the 2026 final.