Ajay Sharma: The Unseen Run-Machine of Indian Cricket

There are domestic records that hint at a player being unlucky. Then there are numbers so outrageous they make the international column beside them look like a misprint.

Ajay Sharma lived in that second category.

More than 10,000 first-class runs. Thirty-eight centuries. An average of 67.46. In the Ranji Trophy, those figures went from elite to almost unreal: 7,319 runs at 80.42, 31 hundreds, and a habit of turning up when the pressure was suffocating. He scored centuries in four of the six Ranji Trophy finals he played.

And yet his Test career lasted one match.

One Test, two innings, 30 and 23 against a West Indies attack led by Courtney Walsh and Patrick Patterson. India won comfortably in Chennai in January 1988, a game remembered for Narendra Hirwani’s freakish 16-wicket debut. Sharma’s contribution went into the scorebook, but his name quietly slid out of the selectors’ conversations. He never played another Test.

He did get a longer run in ODIs – 31 matches between 1988 and 1993 – but the numbers there were ordinary. He scored 424 runs at 20.19, with three fifties, and chipped in with slow left-arm spin. Useful, not irresistible. Nothing in that limited-overs record matched the ferocity of his domestic dominance.

Yet while Sachin Tendulkar and a new generation took over Indian batting’s global stage in the 1990s, Sharma kept piling up runs in the shadows.

The Ranji giant left at the door

Away from international cricket, Sharma became Delhi’s relentless run-factory.

In 1991-92, he hammered 933 runs and then signed off the season with 175 in the Ranji Trophy final against Tamil Nadu as Delhi lifted the title. Three years later, he went bigger: 1,288 first-class runs in a season at an average of 92. His India career had dried up. His appetite for heavy scoring had not.

The peak came in 1996-97, long after his final India appearance. Sharma tore through the Ranji season: 1,033 runs in just eight matches, averaging 114.78, with five centuries and three fifties. It was one of the most dominant campaigns in the competition’s history.

By the time he was done, his first-class numbers read 10,120 runs from 129 matches, 38 centuries, average 67.46. In the company of batters with serious first-class careers, only a handful of historical greats have ever finished with a better average.

Yet he remained the owner of one of Indian cricket’s strangest international records: one Test, two innings, no recall. Years of domestic bowlers being dismantled did nothing to change that.

Then his name stopped being discussed in the context of selection, or even statistics. It disappeared from mainstream cricket conversation for a much darker reason.

The scandal that swallowed a career

In 2000, Indian cricket shook under the weight of the match-fixing scandal that followed the Hansie Cronje revelations. A CBI investigation dug into the links between players and bookmakers. Ajay Sharma’s name surfaced.

The allegations focused on alleged associations with bookmakers and introductions involving other cricketers. Sharma denied taking money to fix matches, but the impact on his cricketing life was immediate and brutal.

In December 2000, the BCCI handed life bans to Sharma and former India captain Mohammad Azharuddin. At 36, with his playing days already nearing their natural end, Sharma saw something more than a career cut off. It was an exile. A near-total separation from the game around which his life had been built.

The punishment stayed in place for years. The stigma stayed longer.

Then, in 2014, the legal picture shifted. A Delhi court declared the BCCI’s disciplinary order against Sharma null and void, ruling that he could not continue to be barred from BCCI-related activities on the basis of that order. It was not a sweeping declaration that every allegation made in the scandal had been false. What the court did was overturn the disciplinary action and the process behind it.

A door that had been locked for 14 years creaked open.

But by then, the damage had spread well beyond Ajay Sharma the cricketer. It had reached Ajay Sharma the father.

His son Manan was trying to build his own career with Delhi. Even that journey became tangled in the shadow of his father’s past. Sharma later recalled asking his son if he could come to the ground to watch him play. Manan told him not to. The family feared that the very sight of Ajay Sharma in the stands, with all the baggage attached to his name, might hurt the younger man’s chances.

For someone whose identity had always been stitched into the fabric of the game, that was a particularly cruel twist. Cricket had reached a point where he could not even walk into a stadium to watch his own child play without worrying about the consequences.

Sharma stepped away and worked outside the sport, including a long stint with the Central Warehousing Corporation. Even after the 2014 judgment, a return to mainstream cricket did not come with a grand announcement. It meant starting again, well below the level he once dominated.

A Ranji script nobody would have believed

Coaching eventually offered him a way back.

He started in academies, learning how to teach the game he had once played almost instinctively. He grew into the role, and then took charge of Jammu and Kashmir’s senior side. It was an appointment that would transform the final chapter of his story.

The beginning was not smooth. Players found him too strict. Sharma himself later accepted that he had to change the way he spoke to the group if he wanted them to respond. The disciplinarian had to learn a different kind of control.

Once that adjustment came, something began to shift.

Jammu and Kashmir grew tougher, more competitive, more sure of themselves in the Ranji Trophy. In the 2025-26 season, they went where they had never been before. They reached the Ranji Trophy final for the first time in their history.

After the semi-final win, the players lifted their coach onto their shoulders. Ajay Sharma, once pushed to the margins of Indian cricket, suddenly sat at the centre of one of its most stirring underdog stories. The image cut sharply against the one that had followed him for two decades.

Then came the title.

Jammu and Kashmir defeated Karnataka on first-innings lead in the final to win the Ranji Trophy for the first time. A team that had never even been to the summit now stood on it, with a coach whose relationship with the competition stretched back over decades.

For Sharma, the symmetry was impossible to ignore. He had once been one of the Ranji Trophy’s most prolific batters, averaging more than 80 in the competition while playing just one Test for India. Then came the life ban, the years in the wilderness, the long silence.

More than twenty years on, the same tournament that had made Ajay Sharma impossible to overlook as a player gave him a way back into the spotlight as a coach.

This time, he was not carrying his bat through another epic innings.

He was the one being carried, on the shoulders of players he had helped take somewhere Jammu and Kashmir – and Ajay Sharma himself – had never been before.