Ninety-five is the most common way to fall short of an IPL century. Fifteen batters have finished an innings on exactly that score since 2008 — more than on 90, more than on 99, more than on any other number in cricket's most uncomfortable decade. Across 1,169 matches and 278,205 deliveries of ball-by-ball data spanning IPL seasons 2008 through 2025, exactly 98 individual innings have ended somewhere between 90 and 99.
Set that against the 110 hundreds scored in the same window and the arithmetic turns uncomfortable. For roughly every nine IPL centuries ever made, eight other batters got within ten runs of one and stopped. The nineties are not a rare tragedy in this tournament — they are an almost equally common outcome. The difference is that nobody frames the scorecard.
The Anatomy of a Near Miss
The 98 nineties split with unsettling symmetry: 50 batters were dismissed somewhere in the nineties, and 48 finished not out. That near-even division matters, because the two halves describe entirely different failures. One is a failure of execution — a false shot, a good ball, a misjudged single. The other is a failure of arithmetic. The innings simply ran out of deliveries.
Fifty Dismissed, Forty-Eight Stranded
Of the 50 batters who were actually dismissed in the nineties, 36 were caught — 72% of all such dismissals. Seven were bowled, four were trapped lbw, and three were run out. That distribution is telling. A batter on 94 in the eighteenth over is not defending; he is swinging, and the catch in the deep is the natural consequence of a man trying to clear a boundary rider to reach three figures.
The 48 not-out nineties break down along a different axis entirely. Twenty-two came batting first, where the batter ran out of overs with the scoreboard still short. Twenty-six came in a chase that finished beneath them — the winning runs arriving while they sat on 93 or 96, the century mathematically unreachable because the match had already been won.
That second group is the quiet cruelty of T20 cricket. A batter can do everything right, win the game single-handedly, and be denied a hundred by the very success of his own innings. The record of teams whose batter was stranded in the nineties is 38 wins and 10 losses — overwhelmingly, being stranded is the price of victory.
The Nine Who Stopped on 99
Nine batters have finished an IPL innings on 99. It is the second-largest cluster in the entire nineties range, which is itself revealing: the closer a batter gets, the more the pressure compounds.
| Score | Batter | Balls | Team | Opponent | Season | Venue | How it ended |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 99* | SK Raina | 52 | CSK | SRH | 2013 | Uppal, Hyderabad | Stranded — innings closed |
| 99 | PP Shaw | 55 | DC | KKR | 2019 | Arun Jaitley, Delhi | Caught b Ferguson — match tied |
| 99 | RD Gaikwad | 57 | CSK | SRH | 2022 | Pune | Caught b Natarajan |
| 99 | Ishan Kishan | 58 | MI | RCB | 2020 | Dubai | Caught b Udana — match tied |
| 99* | MA Agarwal | 58 | PBKS | DC | 2021 | Ahmedabad | Stranded — innings closed |
| 99 | V Kohli | 58 | RCB | Delhi Daredevils | 2013 | Feroz Shah Kotla | Run out |
| 99 | CH Gayle | 63 | Kings XI Punjab | RR | 2020 | Abu Dhabi | Bowled b Archer |
| 99* | CH Gayle | 64 | Kings XI Punjab | RCB | 2019 | Mohali | Stranded — innings closed |
| 99* | S Dhawan | 66 | PBKS | SRH | 2023 | Uppal, Hyderabad | Stranded — innings closed |
Three details deserve attention. Chris Gayle is the only batter in IPL history with two scores of 99, and both came in losing causes — bowled by Jofra Archer in Abu Dhabi in 2020, and marooned unbeaten against his former franchise in Mohali a year earlier. For a man with two IPL scores above 170, being the tournament's most frequent 99-maker is a peculiar footnote.
Second, two of the nine came in matches that finished level and were settled by a Super Over. Prithvi Shaw's 99 in Delhi in 2019 and Ishan Kishan's 99 in Dubai in 2020 both ended in dismissal, and both innings ended with the scores tied. Each man was one run short of a century and his team one run short of a win, in the same delivery.
Third, Virat Kohli's 99 at the Feroz Shah Kotla in 2013 is the only one of the nine to end in a run out — the single most avoidable way to miss a hundred.
Ninety-Five Is the Cruellest Number
The distribution across the decade is not flat. It climbs to a peak at 95 and then falls away sharply:
| Score | 90 | 91 | 92 | 93 | 94 | 95 | 96 | 97 | 98 | 99 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Innings | 8 | 9 | 11 | 12 | 12 | 15 | 8 | 7 | 7 | 9 |
Fifty-five of the 98 nineties — 56% — ended between 90 and 94. The shape makes intuitive sense. A batter arriving in the nineties with overs remaining converts to a hundred often enough that the tail thins out; the ones who cluster at 90 to 95 are disproportionately the batters who got there too late, in the nineteenth or twentieth over, with no runway left. The average nineties innings lasted just 52.9 balls, and 19 of the 98 were struck at a strike rate above 200.
The Complete Record: Who Misses Most
Six batters have been stranded or dismissed in the nineties four or more times.
| Batter | Nineties | Dismissed | Not out | Team W–L | Best | Scores |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| KL Rahul | 6 | 2 | 4 | 4–2 | 98* | 98, 95, 94, 93, 91, 91 |
| DA Warner | 6 | 3 | 3 | 6–0 | 93* | 93, 92, 92, 91, 90, 90* |
| V Kohli | 5 | 2 | 3 | 4–1 | 99 | 99, 93, 92, 92, 90* |
| S Dhawan | 5 | 1 | 4 | 4–1 | 99* | 99, 97, 95, 92, 92 |
| CH Gayle | 4 | 2 | 2 | 2–2 | 99 | 99, 99, 96, 92 |
| JC Buttler | 4 | 1 | 3 | 3–1 | 97* | 97, 95, 95, 94* |
| Shubman Gill | 4 | 2 | 2 | 4–0 | 96 | 96, 94, 93, 90 |
KL Rahul and David Warner share the record at six apiece, but they carry it very differently. Warner's six nineties produced six wins — no batter with more than three has a cleaner record. Rahul's include the slowest ninety in IPL history, an unbeaten 95 from 70 balls against Rajasthan Royals in Jaipur in 2018, in a total of 143 for 7 that lost.
Two smaller records stand out. Ruturaj Gaikwad has three nineties and was dismissed on every one of them — the only batter with three or more never to be stranded. More remarkably, two of those three dismissals were caught off the bowling of the same man, T Natarajan: on 99 in Pune in 2022 and on 98 at Chepauk in 2024. And Glenn Maxwell's three nineties — 95, 95 and 90 — all arrived inside the 2014 season alone, all ended in dismissal, and all three matches were won.
On the bowling side, one name leads:
| Bowler | Batters dismissed in the 90s |
|---|---|
| B Kumar | 4 |
| M Morkel | 3 |
| T Natarajan | 2 |
| Basil Thampi | 2 |
| A Mishra | 2 |
Bhuvneshwar Kumar has ended four IPL innings in the nineties, more than any other bowler — a byproduct of a career spent bowling the overs where nineties happen.
What a Ninety Actually Costs
Here the data contradicts the emotion. A score in the nineties feels like a failure, but it is one of the most reliable winning contributions in the tournament.
Of the 98 nineties, the batter's team won 71, lost 25, and tied 2 — a 74% win rate among decided matches. And 70 of the 98 nineties won the Player of the Match award, a conversion rate no other score band approaches. The scoreboard withholds the milestone; the match award usually does not.
Venue distribution follows scoring conditions almost exactly. Eden Gardens and the Wankhede Stadium lead with 10 apiece, followed by the Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium at Uppal with 8, then the Narendra Modi Stadium, Chepauk and the M Chinnaswamy Stadium with 7 each. The 2018 season produced the most nineties of any single year with 11; 2025 was next with 10.
Legacy Impact: Why the Nineties Still Matter
The nineties are the cleanest available measure of a batter's late-innings conversion — the gap between building an innings and finishing one. It is also the statistic most likely to be misread. A batter with five nineties has not failed five times; he has, on the evidence above, most likely won four of those matches.
Several batters still active in the competition carry substantial nineties records. Virat Kohli of RCB has five, including that run out on 99. KL Rahul, now with DC, holds the joint record at six. Shubman Gill, Jos Buttler and Sai Sudharsan all appear in the archive while playing for GT; Shreyas Iyer of PBKS has three, all in winning causes; Ruturaj Gaikwad of CSK has the three-from-three dismissal record. Every one of them is a hundred-scorer waiting on a different set of last four overs.
This is precisely the kind of conversion signal CricMind's Oracle engine treats as a live input rather than a trivia line. When the model weights a batter's death-overs behaviour, the question is not how many hundreds he has scored but how he behaves between 85 and 100 with the field spread — whether he takes the single, backs himself over the rope, or freezes. The nineties archive is the historical record of exactly that decision, taken 98 times under maximum pressure.
Three Takeaways
- The nineties are nearly as common as centuries. Ninety-eight innings ended between 90 and 99 against 110 hundreds across 2008–2025 — a ratio of 0.89 near-misses per century, far higher than most formats produce.
- Being stranded is usually the price of winning. Forty-eight of the 98 finished not out, and those innings produced a 38–10 record. The century was lost because the match was already won.
- A ninety is a winning score, not a failed one. Teams went 71–25 when a batter reached the nineties, and 70 of the 98 innings won Player of the Match.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many IPL innings have ended in the nineties?
Ninety-eight individual innings finished between 90 and 99 across IPL seasons 2008 to 2025, drawn from ball-by-ball records of 1,169 matches. Fifty ended in dismissal and 48 finished not out.
Who has been dismissed on 99 in the IPL?
Five batters have been dismissed on exactly 99: Prithvi Shaw (2019), Ruturaj Gaikwad (2022), Ishan Kishan (2020), Virat Kohli (2013) and Chris Gayle (2020). A further four — Suresh Raina, Mayank Agarwal, Chris Gayle and Shikhar Dhawan — finished unbeaten on 99.
Which batter has the most IPL nineties?
KL Rahul and David Warner are tied on six each. Warner's six all came in matches his team won, the best record of any batter with more than three nineties.
What is the most common score in the IPL nineties?
Ninety-five, with 15 occurrences — more than any other score in the range. Fifty-five of the 98 nineties, or 56%, ended between 90 and 94.
Which bowler has dismissed the most batters in the nineties?
Bhuvneshwar Kumar, with four. Morne Morkel follows on three, then T Natarajan, Basil Thampi and Amit Mishra on two each. T Natarajan holds the unusual distinction of dismissing Ruturaj Gaikwad in the nineties twice.
Do teams usually win when a batter scores in the nineties?
Yes. Teams went 71–25 with two ties when a batter reached the nineties — a 74% win rate in decided matches — and 70 of the 98 such innings won the Player of the Match award.
Has anyone scored 99 twice in the IPL?
Chris Gayle is the only batter to do so, with 99 against Rajasthan Royals in Abu Dhabi in 2020 and an unbeaten 99 against Royal Challengers in Mohali in 2019. Both matches ended in defeat for his side.