IPL 2026 Dismissal Fingerprints
How does each top bowler take wickets, and which dismissal mode is each top batter most vulnerable to? Bowler-credited dismissal-mode distributions across 73 IPL 2026 matches — caught, bowled, lbw, stumped.
Summary
Two bowlers can take the same number of wickets in completely different ways. One edges batters to the slips; another knocks the stumps over. That how is a fingerprint — it tells you what a bowler actually does to a batter, and which batters are built to resist it. This report decomposes every bowler-credited dismissal in IPL 2026 into its mode (caught, bowled, lbw, stumped, hit-wicket) and reports, for the busiest bowlers and most-dismissed batters, the distribution that defines their season. Run-outs are excluded from bowler fingerprints (they are not bowler-credited) but retained for batter vulnerability.
Scope
| Dimension | Value |
|---|---|
| Competition | IPL 2026 |
| Matches | 73 (both innings; 1 of 74 abandoned, no ball data) |
| Dismissals classified | 835 bowler-credited + run-outs, from score.name on each wicket delivery |
| Bowler fingerprint floor | ≥12 bowler-credited wickets |
| Batter vulnerability floor | ≥8 dismissals (all modes) |
| Dataset version | 2026-10-18 |
The baseline: IPL 2026 is a caught league
Across all 835 bowler-credited dismissals in IPL 2026, the mode split was:
| Mode | Share |
|---|---|
| Caught | 81.0% |
| Bowled | 13.8% |
| LBW | 3.6% |
| Stumped | 1.4% |
| Hit wicket | 0.2% |
Four of every five wickets are catches. This is the reference line every fingerprint below is read against — a bowler at 90% caught is an edge-and-aerial bowler; one at 28% bowled is beating batters through the gate far more often than the league norm.
Bowler fingerprints
Busiest bowlers (≥12 credited wickets), by dismissal mode:
| Bowler | Wkts | Caught | Bowled | LBW | Stumped |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kagiso Rabada | 29 | 86.2% | 10.3% | 3.4% | — |
| Bhuvneshwar Kumar | 28 | 78.6% | 17.9% | 3.6% | — |
| Jofra Archer | 25 | 72.0% | 24.0% | 4.0% | — |
| Anshul Kamboj | 21 | 81.0% | 19.0% | — | — |
| Rashid Khan | 21 | 57.1% | 28.6% | 9.5% | 4.8% |
| Eshan Malinga | 20 | 90.0% | 10.0% | — | — |
| Mohammed Siraj | 19 | 89.5% | 10.5% | — | — |
| Rasikh Salam Dar | 19 | 73.7% | 26.3% | — | — |
| Kartik Tyagi | 18 | 94.4% | 5.6% | — | — |
| Sunil Narine | 17 | 76.5% | 23.5% | — | — |
| Prasidh Krishna | 16 | 93.8% | 6.3% | — | — |
| Prince Yadav | 16 | 68.8% | 31.3% | — | — |
| AM Ghazanfar | 15 | 60.0% | 20.0% | 13.3% | 6.7% |
What stands out:
- Rashid Khan is the most "complete" wicket-taker in the league. At 57% caught / 29% bowled / 10% lbw / 5% stumped he is the only bowler above the floor who takes meaningful wickets in all four modes — the signature of a leg-spinner whose variations beat the bat in every direction. Rashid Khan took 43% of his IPL 2026 wickets by means other than a catch — nearly triple the league's 19%.
- Bhuvneshwar Kumar (17.9% bowled) and Jofra Archer (24% bowled) are the pace outliers — swing and pace-through-the-gate, not just edges. Jofra Archer bowled 24% of his victims in IPL 2026, well above the 13.8% league rate for pace-and-spin combined.
- Prince Yadav (31.3% bowled) has the highest bowled share of any bowler above the floor — a stumps-attacking profile.
- Kartik Tyagi (94.4%), Prasidh Krishna (93.8%), Eshan Malinga (90%) are near-pure edge/aerial bowlers — almost every wicket is a catch.
Batter vulnerability
Most-dismissed batters (≥8 dismissals), by how they got out:
| Batter | Outs | Caught | Bowled | LBW | Other |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vaibhav Suryavanshi | 16 | 87.5% | 6.3% | 6.3% | — |
| Sai Sudharsan | 16 | 81.3% | 6.3% | — | hit-wkt 12.5% |
| Shubman Gill | 16 | 81.3% | 6.3% | 6.3% | stumped 6.3% |
| Travis Head | 15 | 86.7% | 13.3% | — | — |
| Ishan Kishan | 15 | 80.0% | 13.3% | — | run-out 6.7% |
| Abhishek Sharma | 14 | 92.9% | 7.1% | — | — |
| Devdutt Padikkal | 14 | 78.6% | 21.4% | — | — |
| Dhruv Jurel | 14 | 50.0% | 28.6% | 14.3% | stumped 7.1% |
| Jos Buttler | 14 | 64.3% | 21.4% | 7.1% | stumped 7.1% |
| Nicholas Pooran | 14 | 64.3% | 28.6% | — | run-out 7.1% |
| Yashasvi Jaiswal | 14 | 92.9% | 7.1% | — | — |
What stands out:
- Dhruv Jurel is the most "beaten" batter in the league — only 50% of his dismissals were catches; 28.6% bowled and 14.3% lbw mean 43% of Dhruv Jurel's IPL 2026 dismissals came to a ball hitting the stumps or pad, more than double the ~17% league norm for batters. A clear straight-ball vulnerability.
- Jos Buttler and Nicholas Pooran both sit near 21–29% bowled — power hitters beaten through the line.
- Abhishek Sharma and Yashasvi Jaiswal (both 92.9% caught) almost never miss straight — they get out in the air, attacking. Their risk lives in the catching cordon, not on the stumps.
Why this matters
Dismissal mode is the missing half of a matchup. A bowler who takes 86% of his wickets caught (Rabada) against a batter who is 50% bowled (Jurel) is a different contest than the raw averages suggest — one attacks the edge, the other is beaten through the gate. These fingerprints feed directly into the head-to-head and player-profile surfaces: when the data says "dismissed by X," this report says how.
Provenance
Source: CricketStudio aggregation of IPL 2026 ball-by-ball data. Dismissal mode classified from the score.name field on each wicket delivery (Catch Out → caught, Clean Bowled → bowled, LBW OUT → lbw, Stumped, Run Out, Hit Wicket). Bowler fingerprints count bowler-credited dismissals only (run-outs excluded); batter vulnerability counts all dismissals. Sample floors disclosed above. Window: IPL 2026 (73 captured matches, season complete). Computed 2026-10-18 UTC.