There are domestic records that suggest a player was unlucky not to have enjoyed a longer international career. Then there are numbers so extreme that the international record beside them becomes almost difficult to understand, and more than 10,000 first-class runs, 38 centuries and a career average of 67.46 certainly belong in that category. In the Ranji Trophy, the numbers became even more extraordinary. He scored 7,319 runs at an average of 80.42, struck 31 hundreds and repeatedly delivered when the stakes were highest, including centuries in four of the six Ranji Trophy finals he played.
Yet his Test career consisted of precisely one match. He scored 30 and 23 against a West Indies attack containing Courtney Walsh and Patrick Patterson, India won the Test comfortably, and despite everything that followed at domestic level, he was never picked again.
The man was Ajay Sharma, and even the strange mismatch between his domestic greatness and international career would eventually become only one part of his story. Through the 1990s, while Sachin Tendulkar and a new generation became the faces of Indian batting, Sharma kept producing mountains of runs away from the international spotlight.
The Ranji giant India barely saw
Sharma’s only Test came against West Indies in Chennai in January 1988, the match remembered principally for Narendra Hirwani’s extraordinary 16-wicket debut. Sharma made 53 runs across the two innings, contributed to an Indian victory and then never received another opportunity in the format. He did have a longer run in ODIs, playing 31 matches between 1988 and 1993, but his returns there were considerably more modest. Sharma scored 424 ODI runs at 20.19, with three half-centuries, while also contributing with his slow left-arm bowling, so his limited-overs record never carried the same force as his domestic numbers.
What happened away from international cricket, however, was remarkable. Sharma became one of Delhi’s great Ranji Trophy run-machines and continued producing seasons that made his absence from the Test side increasingly striking. In 1991-92, he amassed 933 runs and then produced 175 in the final against Tamil Nadu as Delhi won the title. Three seasons later, he scored 1,288 first-class runs at an average of 92, showing that his appetite for big scores had only grown after his India opportunities had dried up.
The most extraordinary phase came in 1996-97, long after his final appearance for India. Sharma piled up 1,033 Ranji Trophy runs in just eight matches at an average of 114.78, with five centuries and three fifties in one of the most dominant campaigns of his career. His first-class career eventually closed at 10,120 runs from 129 matches, with 38 hundreds and an average of 67.46. Among batters with a substantial number of first-class innings, only a tiny collection of historical giants finished with a better average.
For all that dominance, Sharma remained the owner of one of Indian cricket’s strangest international records. He played one Test, batted twice, and never received a second chance despite spending years afterwards demolishing domestic attacks. The reason his name later disappeared from cricket’s mainstream consciousness, though, was far darker than selection. By the end of 2000, his career and reputation had been consumed by the match-fixing scandal that shook Indian cricket.
The ban that changed everything
Indian cricket was rocked in 2000 by the match-fixing scandal that followed the Hansie Cronje revelations. The subsequent CBI investigation examined links between players and bookmakers, and Sharma was among those whose names surfaced during the inquiry. The allegations were serious and centred on alleged associations with bookmakers and introductions involving other cricketers. Sharma disputed claims that he had received money for fixing matches, but the repercussions for his cricketing life were immediate and severe.
In December 2000, the BCCI imposed life bans on Sharma and former India captain Mohammad Azharuddin. For Sharma, then 36 and already nearing the end of his playing days, the punishment amounted to an almost complete separation from the game around which his life had been built.
Years later, however, the legal picture changed considerably. In 2014, a Delhi court declared the BCCI’s disciplinary order against Sharma null and void and held that he could not continue to be barred from BCCI-related activities on the basis of that order. The ruling should not simply be described as a criminal court establishing that every allegation made during the scandal had been false. What the court did was overturn the disciplinary action and the process underpinning it, reopening a door that had effectively remained closed to Sharma for 14 years.
By then, the consequences had travelled far beyond the loss of a cricketing career. Sharma’s son Manan was attempting to establish himself as a professional cricketer with Delhi, and even that became entangled with the stigma surrounding his father. Sharma later recalled asking his son whether he could come to the ground to watch him play. Manan told him not to, with the family fearing that his father’s presence and the controversy attached to his name could adversely affect the younger cricketer’s own career.
For a man whose identity had been tied to cricket for most of his life, that was a particularly cruel turn. The game had reached the point where he could not comfortably walk into a stadium simply to watch his own child play. Sharma spent years working outside the sport, including a long spell with the Central Warehousing Corporation. Even after the 2014 judgment reopened his route into organised cricket, returning to the mainstream did not happen overnight and he had to rebuild his place in the game from much further down.
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A Ranji Trophy ending nobody could have scripted
Coaching eventually gave Sharma his way back into cricket. He worked through academies, developed as a coach and later took charge of Jammu and Kashmir’s senior side, beginning a chapter that would completely change how the final act of his story could be told. His methods did not work immediately. Players reportedly found him excessively strict, and Sharma later acknowledged that he had to alter the way he communicated with the group if he wanted the team to respond to him.
What followed became one of the more remarkable late chapters in a career that had already contained almost everything. Jammu and Kashmir steadily became a stronger Ranji Trophy side under Sharma and, in 2025-26, went further than they ever had before. They reached the Ranji Trophy final for the first time in their history. After the semi-final victory, the players lifted Sharma onto their shoulders, giving the former India batter an image very different from the one that had followed him for much of the previous two decades.
Then came the title itself. Jammu and Kashmir defeated Karnataka on first-innings lead in the final to win the Ranji Trophy for the first time in their history, completing a remarkable rise under a coach whose own relationship with the competition ran back several decades. For Sharma, the symmetry was difficult to miss. He had once been one of the competition’s greatest batters, averaging more than 80 in the Ranji Trophy yet playing only one Test for India, before a life ban and years of stigma pushed him almost completely outside cricket.
More than two decades later, the same tournament that had once made Ajay Sharma impossible for Indian cricket to ignore gave him his way back into its spotlight. This time, he was not carrying the bat through another marathon innings; he was being carried by the players he had helped take somewhere Jammu and Kashmir had never been before.
