Ajay Sharma: The Ranji Giant's Unforgettable Journey
There are domestic records that suggest a player was unlucky. Then there are numbers so outrageous they make the international column beside them look like a misprint.
Ajay Sharma belongs firmly in the second category.
More than 10,000 first-class runs. Thirty-eight centuries. An average of 67.46. Those are the kind of figures that usually sit next to names carved into the game’s mythology. In the Ranji Trophy, he went even further into the realm of the absurd: 7,319 runs at 80.42, 31 hundreds, and a habit of turning finals into his own private stage. He scored centuries in four of the six Ranji Trophy finals he played.
Yet his Test career lasted one match. One.
One Test, then the door slammed shut
January 1988, Chennai. India vs West Indies. The Test is remembered for Narendra Hirwani’s 16 wickets on debut, a spell that turned him into a sensation overnight. Somewhere in that story, almost as a footnote, stands Ajay Sharma.
He scored 30 and 23 against an attack featuring Courtney Walsh and Patrick Patterson. India won comfortably. Sharma contributed, looked solid, and then disappeared from the format as if someone had flicked a switch. He never played another Test.
He did get a run in ODIs. Between 1988 and 1993, he played 31 matches, scoring 424 runs at 20.19 with three fifties, chipping in with his slow left-arm spin. Useful, but not spectacular. His limited-overs numbers never carried the same weight as the mountain of runs he kept piling up for Delhi.
What he did away from the international cameras, though, bordered on the ridiculous.
Sharma became one of Delhi’s great Ranji machines, season after season turning up with scores that made his absence from India’s Test side harder and harder to explain. In 1991-92, he hammered 933 runs and then signed off with 175 in the final against Tamil Nadu as Delhi lifted the title. Three seasons later, he produced 1,288 first-class runs at an average of 92, proof that the hunger hadn’t dimmed even as India had seemingly moved on without him.
Then came 1996-97, long after his final India appearance. This was his peak of domination. Sharma plundered 1,033 Ranji Trophy runs in just eight matches at an average of 114.78, with five centuries and three fifties. It was the kind of campaign that usually defines a player’s legacy.
His first-class career closed at 10,120 runs from 129 matches, with those 38 hundreds and that towering average of 67.46. Among batters with serious first-class volume, only a tiny group of historical greats sit above him.
And yet, in the Test column: one match, two innings, and silence.
For years, that mismatch was the great curiosity of his career. Then something darker swallowed the story whole.
The scandal that erased a career
By 2000, Indian cricket was no longer talking about Ajay Sharma the run-machine. It was talking about Ajay Sharma the banned cricketer.
The Hansie Cronje revelations detonated across world cricket, and the aftershocks hit India hard. A CBI investigation dug into links between players and bookmakers. Sharma’s name surfaced in that inquiry, tied to allegations of associations with bookmakers and introductions involving other cricketers.
He denied receiving money for fixing matches, but once his name was in that frame, the fallout was brutal.
In December 2000, the BCCI handed life bans to Sharma and former India captain Mohammad Azharuddin. Sharma was 36, already nearing the natural end of his playing days, but the punishment went far beyond retirement. It cut him off almost completely from the game that had shaped his life.
The numbers that once defined him were replaced by a single line: life ban.
Years later, the story shifted again. In 2014, a Delhi court declared the BCCI’s disciplinary order against Sharma null and void and ruled 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 during the scandal had been false. What it did was tear down the disciplinary process that had exiled him and reopen a door that had stayed bolted for 14 years.
By then, the damage had spread well beyond a lost career.
Sharma’s son, Manan, was trying to build his own path as a professional cricketer with Delhi. Even that journey became tangled in the shadow of his father’s name. 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 Ajay’s presence, and the controversy attached to him, might stain the younger Sharma’s prospects.
For a man whose identity had been welded to cricket, it was a cruel twist. He could not even walk into a stadium to watch his own child play without worrying he might be doing harm.
Sharma stepped away into another world. He worked outside the sport, including a long spell with the Central Warehousing Corporation. Even after the 2014 judgment cleared his way back into organised cricket, there was no grand return. No instant redemption arc. He had to start again, far from the spotlight he had once seemed destined to own.
A different way back: the coach from the cold
His route back came not with a bat in his hand, but with a clipboard.
Coaching slowly drew Sharma into the game again. He worked in academies, learned how to teach rather than just perform, and eventually took charge of Jammu and Kashmir’s senior side. It was an appointment that, at first glance, looked like a quiet, modest chapter to close a noisy, complicated life in cricket.
It did not start smoothly. Players reportedly found him too strict, too hard-edged. Sharma himself later admitted he had to change how he spoke to the group if he wanted them to respond. The old first-class colossus had to learn a new craft: how to reach players who had grown up in a different era, in a very different environment.
Once he adjusted, the story began to turn.
Jammu and Kashmir grew tougher, more competitive, more organised. Results improved. Confidence grew. The team started to believe it belonged deeper into the Ranji season, not just on its fringes.
Then came 2025-26.
Jammu and Kashmir went on the kind of run that changes how a team is seen forever. They reached the Ranji Trophy final for the first time in their history, smashing through a ceiling that had held for decades. After their semi-final win, the players lifted Sharma onto their shoulders.
For a man who had spent years as a symbol of scandal and exile, that single image — carried by his players, smiling, back in the centre of a cricket ground — felt like a direct rebuttal to the narrative that had followed him for so long.
And then they finished the job.
Jammu and Kashmir beat Karnataka on first-innings lead in the final to win the Ranji Trophy for the first time. A team that had never been this far, guided by a coach whose own relationship with the competition stretched back to his days as its most relentless run-scorer.
For Sharma, the symmetry was impossible to ignore. He had once dominated the Ranji Trophy as a batter, averaging more than 80 in the competition, yet played only one Test for India. Then came a life ban, years of stigma, and a slow, painful drift away from the game.
More than two decades on, the same tournament that had made Ajay Sharma too good for Indian cricket to overlook gave him something else: a way back into its light.
This time, he wasn’t batting through another marathon innings. He was up on the shoulders of his players, carried by the very game that had once cast him out, leading Jammu and Kashmir to a place they had never been before.
