Vadodara International Cricket Stadium: pitch report, records and the 20 women’s matches to one men’s

The Vadodara International Cricket Stadium at Kotambi, on the eastern edge of the city, opened on 22 December 2024 after sixteen years of construction. It holds 40,000, which makes it bigger than the Wankhede and bigger than Punjab’s new ground at Mullanpur, and the Baroda Cricket Association owns and runs it.

Then there is the thing nobody writes down about it. Count the senior internationals plus the IPL and WPL matches the ground has staged, which is every level above domestic cricket, and you get 21. Twenty of them were women’s cricket. Run the same count across every Indian ground and Kotambi is the only one where women’s cricket outnumbers men’s by more than a rounding error.

Ground	Women’s	Men’s
Kotambi, Vadodara	20	1
Brabourne, Mumbai	35	35
DY Patil, Navi Mumbai	35	37
Chinnaswamy, Bengaluru	28	139
Wankhede, Mumbai	10	170

The two Mumbai grounds are level because both have hosted whole WPL seasons on top of long men’s histories. Kotambi has the WPL and almost nothing else.

Vadodara cricket stadium at a glance

Detail	Kotambi Stadium
Also known as	BCA Stadium, Kotambi Stadium
Location	Kotambi, Vadodara, Gujarat
Capacity	40,000
Owner	Baroda Cricket Association
Ground broken	2008
Opened	22 December 2024, women’s ODI
Cost	About 200 crore rupees
First men’s ODI	11 January 2026, India v New Zealand
WPL matches	17, including the 2026 final

Sixteen years is the number worth pausing on. Ground was broken in 2008, the stadium opened at the end of 2024, and inside the next thirteen months it had staged a three-match India series, a full WPL season and a men’s one-day international. Vadodara went from having no international venue to having a busy one almost immediately.

Kotambi pitch report: what 17 WPL matches say

This is a chasing ground, and the margin is not subtle.

Measure	WPL at Kotambi
Matches	17
Won batting first	5
Won chasing	12
Captains who fielded first	Most matches
First-innings average	Just under the WPL norm
WPL average, all venues	Marginally higher

In the ground’s first WPL season, February 2025, the side chasing won all six matches. That has softened since: 2026 went six to five in favour of the chase across eleven games. The toss has been worth a great deal either way, with most winners choosing to bowl first at the venue.

Scoring sits marginally below the league. Kotambi’s first-innings average sits a little below the WPL’s across all grounds, and that gap widened rather than closed in 2026. So the surface is not getting quicker while the competition does. Anything around 160 is a real total, and the team defending it has won five times in 17.

WPL records at Kotambi Stadium

Record	Figure	Match
Highest total	204/4	Bengaluru v Delhi, final, 5 Feb 2026
Highest first innings	203/4	Delhi v Bengaluru, final, 5 Feb 2026
Lowest first innings	109 all out	Bengaluru v Delhi, 24 Jan 2026
Highest score	100 off 57, Nat Sciver-Brunt	Mumbai v Bengaluru, 26 Jan 2026
Best bowling	4/22, Nadine de Klerk	UP v Bengaluru, 29 Jan 2026
Most runs	Nat Sciver-Brunt	Across both seasons
Most wickets	Chinelle Henry	Across both seasons

The 2026 final is the ground’s showpiece and its highest-scoring WPL game: Delhi Capitals made 203 for 4, Royal Challengers Bengaluru chased it with two balls left, and Smriti Mandhana’s 87 from 41 balls was the innings of the night. Delhi have the best record here of any side, six wins from nine, while UP Warriorz have played five at Kotambi and lost all five.

Sciver-Brunt’s 100 from 57 balls on 26 January 2026 is still the only hundred scored at the ground in the WPL. The next WPL squads get rebuilt at the auction in Kochi on 28 October, and the retention deadline that shapes it falls on 28 September.

The one men’s international, and how different it looked

India played New Zealand here on 11 January 2026, the ground’s first men’s international. New Zealand made 300 for 8, India chased 306 for 6 with an over to spare, and Virat Kohli took the match award. The 606 runs in that game are more than any WPL match here has produced by a distance, and it is the only completed 50-over men’s fixture the ground has to go on.

That is worth holding lightly. One match is not a pitch report, and a men’s ODI and a women’s T20 played on the same square tell you about the format as much as the soil. But it does mean that every confident claim you read about how Kotambi plays for men’s cricket rests on a single afternoon in January.

India’s women at Vadodara

The ground opened with a three-match women’s ODI series against West Indies in December 2024, and India won all three. The scoring was heavy in the first two: 314 for 9 on 22 December, when West Indies were then bowled out for 103 and lost by 211 runs, and 358 for 5 on 24 December. The third, on 27 December, was the tight one, West Indies bowled out for 162 and India home by five wickets.

Those 358 and 314 remain the two biggest totals made at Kotambi in any format, men’s cricket included. Set them against a WPL par of 159 and you have the whole point about format: the same square gives up 350 in 50 overs and holds teams to 160 in twenty.

Before Kotambi: the old Vadodara grounds

Vadodara had international cricket long before 2024, at the Reliance Stadium, which is the same ground as the one the scorecards call the IPCL Sports Complex. It staged ten men’s ODIs between October 1994 and December 2010: India beat Sri Lanka there in November 2005, beat West Indies by 160 runs in January 2007 with Sachin Tendulkar taking the match award, lost twice to Australia, and finished the run with a nine-wicket win over New Zealand. It has held women’s internationals since 1997, among them three ODIs against Australia in 2018 and three against South Africa in 2019. Its capacity is 20,000, half of Kotambi’s.

No men’s international was played in the city between December 2010 and January 2026. Kotambi ended a fifteen-year gap, and it did so a year after hosting its first women’s series.

What is next at Kotambi

Zimbabwe’s women tour India in October 2026, and all three ODIs are at Kotambi, on 23, 25 and 28 October. That will take the ground to 23 women’s matches at this level against the one men’s game. WPL 2027 runs from 14 January to 7 February, and Kotambi and the Brabourne, the top two rows of the table above, are the current front-runners to host it, though Varanasi’s new stadium is also in contention. Baroda also play their Ranji Trophy and Vijay Hazare cricket here, so the ground is busy outside the international calendar even if the men’s international fixtures have not followed.

For a venue that took sixteen years to build, the pattern is a genuinely unusual one, and it is a deliberate one: the BCA went after the women’s calendar when it was still cheap to host and now owns a share of it. Compare that with Mullanpur, the other new Indian ground of this cycle, which opened with the IPL and got its first women’s international eighteen months later. Both are among the larger grounds India has built, and they have taken opposite routes to filling them.

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