Worst Bowling Figures in IPL History: The Anatomy of 4-0-76

One dot ball. That is what Jofra Archer managed across four overs on 23 March 2025 — a single delivery, out of twenty-four legal ones, that the Sunrisers Hyderabad batters did not score from. By the time his spell was finished he had conceded 76 runs, the most expensive bowling figures in the history of the Indian Premier League, and the scoreboard at the Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium in Uppal read 286 for 6.

Cricket's record books are built almost entirely as monuments to achievement. We catalogue the highest scores, the best figures, the longest sixes. But the ledger has another side, and it is far more revealing about how Twenty20 cricket has changed. A complete pass through 278,205 deliveries from 1,169 IPL matches between 2008 and 2025 — every ball of the league's ball-by-ball era — yields 13,878 individual bowling spells. This is the story of the most punishing of them, and of why they have suddenly stopped being rare.

The night the record fell

Twenty-four balls, seventy-six runs

Archer's figures of 4-0-76 came in only the second match of the 2025 season, and they were assembled with a brutality that the raw number hides. Ten of his deliveries went for four. Four more went for six. He bowled two wides and a no-ball. The single dot ball is the detail that lingers: in a format where a good over is defined by the pressure of deliveries that yield nothing, Archer created that pressure once in twenty-four attempts.

The context matters, because it always does with bowling figures. Sunrisers Hyderabad were in the middle of assembling 286 for 6, at the time the second-highest total ever posted in the IPL. Rajasthan Royals still nearly made a contest of it, replying with 242 for 6 before losing by 44 runs. The match produced 528 runs. On a night like that, being the most expensive bowler on the field is less an indictment than a coin toss — and the coin landed on Jofra Archer, a bowler whose career economy rate sits comfortably among the better fast bowlers of his generation.

There is a neat symmetry buried in the same scorecard. Pat Cummins, captaining Sunrisers Hyderabad that evening, conceded 60 runs from his own four overs. He finished on the winning side. The same twenty overs of cricket produced both the worst bowling figures in IPL history and one of the ten most expensive spells ever bowled by a bowler who won the match.

The record he broke: Basil Thampi's seven-year mark

Before Archer, the mark belonged to Basil Thampi, who conceded 70 from four wicketless overs for Sunrisers Hyderabad against Royal Challengers Bangalore at the Chinnaswamy on 17 May 2018. Thampi's spell survived as the benchmark for seven seasons, which in the modern IPL is close to geological time. It was the sort of record that felt like an outlier — a young seamer having the worst night of his career on the most unforgiving ground in the country.

What is striking, looking back from the far end of the 2025 data, is how quickly Thampi's 70 stopped looking extreme. It now sits fifth on the all-time list. All four spells above it were bowled in 2024 or 2025.

The most expensive spell that ended in a win

Mohammed Shami's 4-0-75 for Sunrisers Hyderabad against Punjab Kings on 12 April 2025 is the second-worst analysis in IPL history, and the most expensive spell ever bowled by a member of the winning side. Punjab Kings made 245 for 6; Sunrisers won anyway. Shami was struck for seven sixes, the joint-most in any spell on this list, and still walked off a winner.

That distinction is rarer than it sounds. Of the thirty most expensive spells in IPL history, twenty-seven ended in defeat. The three exceptions — Shami, Sandeep Sharma's 4-0-65 for Kings XI Punjab in 2014, and Michael Neser's 4-0-62 in 2013 — are reminders that a single bowler's figures are a poor proxy for a team's night.

Rinku Singh, Yash Dayal, and the over that made someone else's career

The most famous expensive spell in IPL history is not the largest. On 9 April 2023 at Ahmedabad, Yash Dayal finished with 4-0-69 for Gujarat Titans against Kolkata Knight Riders, conceding eight sixes — more than any other bowler in the top thirty. Five of them came consecutively, in the final over, off the bat of Rinku Singh, to turn a lost chase into a KKR win at 207 for 7.

It is the clearest illustration of why this record deserves its own accounting. Dayal's figures were the sixth-worst in league history, and the over is replayed constantly — but almost always as a celebration of the batter. The bowler went on to play for Royal Challengers Bengaluru and won a title with them. Expensive spells are survivable. That is the point.

The complete record: every spell of 60 or more

Across eighteen seasons of ball-by-ball data, exactly 41 spells have conceded 60 runs or more — 0.30% of all 13,878 spells bowled. Only four have reached 73.

A separate cut of the same data is arguably more damning than the run totals. Khaleel Ahmed conceded 65 runs in just three overs for Chennai Super Kings against Royal Challengers Bengaluru on 3 May 2025 — an economy rate of 21.67, the worst of any spell of three overs or more in IPL history. He was not asked to bowl a fourth.

The escalation, season by season

This is the table that explains the record. It counts, for every season in the ball-by-ball era, how many spells conceded 50 or more, how many reached 60, and what the league-wide economy rate was.

Two numbers carry the argument. Not one bowler conceded 60 runs in the first four seasons of the IPL, from 2008 through 2011. In 2024 alone, twelve did. Put differently: of the 41 spells of 60-plus in league history, twenty came in the 2024 and 2025 seasons — very nearly half the all-time list, drawn from two seasons out of eighteen.

The league economy rate tells the same story more calmly. It sat at 7.32 in 2009. By 2025 it had climbed to 9.52 — more than two runs an over, across every ball bowled by every bowler in the competition.

It happens to the best bowlers

The list of bowlers with the most 50-plus spells is not a list of journeymen.

Bhuvneshwar Kumar heads it, and he is a two-time Purple Cap winner. Rashid Khan, who has a serious claim to being the finest T20 spinner in history, appears with five. Yuzvendra Chahal, the IPL's leading wicket-taker, has seven. The correlation this table actually captures is longevity and workload: bowl enough overs in enough death-over situations across enough seasons, and the tail of the distribution will find you.

The distribution of who did the damage is similarly concentrated. Mumbai Indians were the batting side in 24 of the spells that went for 55 or more, the most of any franchise, with Sunrisers Hyderabad next on 19. By city, Mumbai's grounds hosted 23 such maulings and Hyderabad 17.

What the modern record book means for bowlers

The temptation is to read this as a story about bowling getting worse. The data does not support that. Bowlers are fitter, better coached, and armed with a far wider range of slower balls and wide yorkers than the class of 2009 ever had. What changed sits on the other side of the stumps: two new balls, shorter square boundaries, the impact player rule deepening batting orders to eight and nine, and a generation of batters raised to attack from the first over rather than the seventh.

The practical consequence is that economy rate has quietly become a less useful stand-alone measure of a bowler's night, and that four-over analyses need reading against the total on the board. A spell of 4-0-45 in 2009 and a spell of 4-0-45 in 2025 are not remotely the same performance. Teams already understand this — it is why the market for genuine death-over specialists has stayed so expensive even as their raw figures have deteriorated.

This is also precisely the problem CricMind's Oracle engine is built to handle. Its Macro layer weights venue and pitch characteristics ahead of raw recent form for exactly this reason: a bowler's last-three-match economy tells you far less than where those matches were played and against which batting orders. Reading a 4-0-60 at the Chinnaswamy as equivalent to a 4-0-60 at Chepauk is the single most common error in pre-match analysis, and it is the kind of context adjustment that separates a model from a scorecard.

For the 2026 season and the ones after it, the honest expectation is that this record falls again, and sooner than seven years. Archer's 76 required a specific and repeatable set of conditions: a flat surface, a 280-plus total, and a bowler unlucky enough to be holding the ball during the acceleration. All three are becoming more common, not less.

Three takeaways

• The record is young and getting younger. Basil Thampi's 70 stood for seven seasons; Archer beat it in 2025 by six runs, and four of the five most expensive spells ever bowled came in 2024 and 2025 alone.
• Expensive spells are a scoring-environment story, not a talent story. The league economy rate rose from 7.32 in 2009 to 9.52 in 2025, and the bowlers appearing most often on the 50-plus list — Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Rashid Khan, Pat Cummins, Kagiso Rabada — are among the best in the format.
• Figures need context to mean anything. Mohammed Shami conceded 75 and won the match. Twenty-seven of the thirty worst spells ended in defeat, but the three that did not are the ones worth remembering when judging a bowler on a number alone.

Frequently asked questions

What are the worst bowling figures in IPL history?

Jofra Archer's 4-0-76 for Rajasthan Royals against Sunrisers Hyderabad on 23 March 2025 at the Rajiv Gandhi International Stadium in Hyderabad. Sunrisers made 286 for 6 and won by 44 runs. Archer conceded ten fours and four sixes, and bowled a single dot ball in the spell.

Whose record did Archer break?

Basil Thampi's 4-0-70, bowled for Sunrisers Hyderabad against Royal Challengers Bangalore at Bengaluru on 17 May 2018. That mark stood for seven seasons and now ranks fifth on the all-time list.

Has a bowler ever conceded 70 or more and still won the match?

No. The most expensive spell by a bowler on the winning side is Mohammed Shami's 4-0-75 for Sunrisers Hyderabad against Punjab Kings on 12 April 2025. Of the thirty most expensive spells in IPL history, twenty-seven ended in defeat.

What is the worst economy rate in an IPL spell?

For a completed four-over spell, Archer's 19.00 in 2025. If shorter spells of at least three overs are included, Khaleel Ahmed's 3-0-65 for Chennai Super Kings against Royal Challengers Bengaluru on 3 May 2025 is worse still, at 21.67 an over.

Which bowler has been hit for 50 or more most often?

Bhuvneshwar Kumar, with eight such spells across his IPL career, followed by Shardul Thakur, Pat Cummins, Mohit Sharma, Mohammed Shami, Sam Curran and Yuzvendra Chahal on seven each. The list reflects sustained workload in death overs rather than any deficiency in skill.

Are expensive spells becoming more common?

Substantially. No bowler conceded 60 runs in a spell between 2008 and 2011. Twelve did so in 2024 and eight in 2025, meaning roughly half of all 60-plus spells in IPL history were bowled across just those two seasons. The proportion of spells going for 50 or more rose from 0.6% in 2009 to 6.1% in 2024.

How many sixes were hit in the most expensive spells?

Yash Dayal conceded eight sixes in his 4-0-69 against Kolkata Knight Riders in 2023, the most in any spell in the top thirty — five of them consecutively to Rinku Singh in the final over. Mohammed Shami and Mohit Sharma were each hit for seven in their spells of 75 and 73.