Jonny Bairstow Holds Both Ends of the IPL Record Book

Jonny Bairstow has played only 52 IPL matches, which by the standards of the competition's long-servers is barely a career. He was never the highest-paid overseas batter in his side, never captained, never won the tournament and never appeared in a final. His aggregate is a shade under 1,700 runs.

And yet he is present, as a principal actor, in two of the entries that most clearly mark how Twenty20 scoring changed between 2019 and 2024: the biggest opening partnership in IPL history, and the highest successful run chase in the history of the format anywhere. Those two innings are separated by five years and two franchises, and read together they make a better argument about the era than a longer, tidier career would.

2019: the partnership that broke a total

Bairstow arrived at Sunrisers Hyderabad in 2019, signed for a modest fee, and was put in to open with David Warner, who was returning to the competition after a year out. What followed was one of the most productive opening pairs any franchise has assembled.

The high point came in Hyderabad against Royal Challengers Bengaluru. Bairstow made 114 from 56 balls, Warner an unbeaten 100 from 55, and the pair put on 185 inside 16.2 overs — twelve sixes and seventeen fours between them — before the first wicket fell. Hyderabad finished on 231 for 2. That 185 remains the biggest opening stand in IPL history, having taken the record from the 184 that Gautam Gambhir and Chris Lynn had made unbroken in 2017. It was only the fourth occasion in the history of Twenty20 cricket that both openers had made hundreds in the same innings.

The pair also became the first in IPL history to share three century partnerships in consecutive innings, which is the more revealing record of the two. A single 185 is a night when everything comes off. Three hundred-run stands in a row is a functioning method: Warner accumulating with brutal orthodoxy at one end, Bairstow attacking the length and playing over the top at the other, and neither of them ever facing a genuinely settled bowler because the other had already unsettled him.

What Hyderabad did with it, and why it did not last

Hyderabad's problem in that period was structural rather than personal. The opening pair was the best in the competition and the middle order behind it was among the thinnest, which meant a fast start was necessary rather than merely useful. When the openers came off, Hyderabad posted enormous totals. When they did not, the innings tended to fold.

Bairstow's own availability was the other complication, and it is worth stating plainly because it shaped his whole IPL career. As a first-choice England wicketkeeper-batter across formats through that period, he was frequently available for only part of a season, and English international commitments in the northern spring routinely cut into the second half of the IPL. He played three seasons for Hyderabad, was sold to Punjab Kings for a substantially higher fee, and missed the 2023 season entirely while recovering from a serious leg injury sustained away from cricket.

Fifty-two matches over six listed seasons is the arithmetic of a very good player who was never able to give a franchise a full campaign. Compare that with a Quinton de Kock or a Jos Buttler, overseas keeper-batters of similar quality whose franchise records are two or three times the size, and the difference is availability rather than ability.

2024: the chase that moved the ceiling

The second record is the one that will outlast the first in the memory, because it changed what teams believe is possible.

On 26 April 2024 at Eden Gardens, Kolkata Knight Riders made 261 for 6. On any reasonable historical reading, that was a winning score — no side had ever chased more than about 225 to win a Twenty20 match, and a target of 262 required a scoring rate above 13 an over for the entire innings.

Punjab got it with eight balls to spare, finishing on 262 for 2. Bairstow made 108 not out from 48 balls, with eight fours and nine sixes; Shashank Singh made 68 not out from 28. Between them, Punjab hit 24 sixes, and the two teams together set a record for the most sixes in a Twenty20 match. It stands as the highest successful chase in the history of Twenty20 cricket, not merely the IPL, and it sits at the top of the IPL highest successful chases list.

The tactical significance is easy to state. Before that night, a side defending 260 in the IPL treated the match as won and bowled accordingly — protecting the boundary, accepting singles, working on the assumption that the required rate would eventually break the batting side's nerve. That assumption no longer holds. A chasing side with two hitters in touch and a good surface now believes 262 is available, and captains defending large totals have had to plan for it. The highest team totals list has been rewritten repeatedly since, and that match is a reasonable place to date the shift from.

The England career, and why the IPL record looks thin next to it

Bairstow's international record is much larger than his franchise record and much better known: a long England career across all three formats, more than a hundred Tests, a central role in the 2019 World Cup-winning side and in the aggressive Test approach England adopted from 2022. His IPL career is a fragment of his professional life, not the centre of it.

That is precisely why the two IPL records are interesting. They were not the product of a player who organised his life around the competition. They came from a batter who turned up for parts of six seasons, in two different roles for two different franchises, and happened to be present — and decisive — on the two nights that most clearly registered how far the format's scoring ceiling had moved. His overall IPL average of around 35 with two hundreds and nine fifties is the record of a genuinely good Twenty20 opener, no more and no less.

What the two innings, taken together, argue

Five years separate the 185 and the 262. In 2019, 231 for 2 was an exceptional total built by two batters having the innings of their lives, and it won the match comfortably. In 2024, 261 was not enough.

That gap is the story of Twenty20 batting in the interval, and Bairstow is a rare witness to both ends of it. Nothing about his own method changed much in between — he was the same aggressive, straight-hitting, front-foot opener who scored heavily against pace and preferred the ball coming on. What changed was the environment around him: better bats, flatter surfaces, deeper batting orders, and above all a collective belief about what a chase can be, which he helped to demonstrate.

The history of England's cricket will record Bairstow primarily as a Test and World Cup player, correctly. The IPL record book will record him as the man on the scorecard for its biggest opening stand and its most improbable chase — two records set at opposite ends of a short career, in a competition he only ever visited part-time.