Ajay Sharma: The Ranji Giant India Overlooked

There are domestic records that make you shake your head and wonder how a player didn’t play more for his country. Then there are numbers so outrageous they almost 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. In the Ranji Trophy, the numbers swell into something almost mythical: 7,319 runs at 80.42, 31 hundreds, and a habit of turning up when it mattered most – hundreds in four of the six Ranji Trophy finals he played.

And yet his Test career lasted exactly one match.

One Test, two innings, and gone

Sharma’s only Test arrived in Chennai in January 1988, against a West Indies side led by the fire of Courtney Walsh and Patrick Patterson. The match belongs to Indian cricket folklore for another reason: Narendra Hirwani’s astonishing 16-wicket debut.

In the shadows of that performance, Sharma quietly made 30 and 23. Solid runs, important in a comfortable India win. Not spectacular, not disastrous. Just the kind of debut that usually buys a middle-order batter another look.

He never got it.

The selectors shut the door on him in Tests and, despite everything that followed in domestic cricket, never opened it again. His international career lived on briefly in ODIs – 31 matches between 1988 and 1993, 424 runs at 20.19 with three fifties, and some slow left-arm to balance the side. Useful, but nowhere near the force of his domestic dominance.

Away from the lights of international cricket, though, Sharma turned into one of the most relentless run-machines Indian domestic cricket has seen.

The Ranji giant in plain sight

For Delhi, season after season, he made the Ranji Trophy look like his private playground.

In 1991-92, he piled up 933 runs and then signed off the season with 175 in the final against Tamil Nadu as Delhi lifted the trophy. Three years later, he produced 1,288 first-class runs at 92 for the season, proof that his appetite for big scores had only grown even as his India career had withered away.

Then came 1996-97, long after he had played his last game for India. This was the season when his numbers stopped being impressive and started to look absurd. Sharma hammered 1,033 Ranji runs in just eight matches, averaging 114.78, with five centuries and three fifties. Bowlers knew what was coming; they still couldn’t stop it.

By the time he was done, his first-class ledger read 10,120 runs from 129 matches, 38 hundreds, average 67.46. Among batters with a serious body of work, only a tiny handful of historical greats sit above that mark.

And yet, on the international page, his name sits frozen: one Test, two innings, never picked again. For years, that was the great mystery of Ajay Sharma – the gulf between what he did in India’s premier domestic competition and what he was allowed to do in an India shirt.

Then another, darker story took over.

From run-machine to outcast

In 2000, Indian cricket was shaken to its core by match-fixing revelations that began with Hansie Cronje and quickly spread across borders. The CBI investigation that followed dug into links between players and bookmakers. Sharma’s name emerged among those under scrutiny.

The allegations centred on his alleged associations with bookmakers and introductions involving other cricketers. Sharma denied receiving money for fixing matches, but once his name was in the file, the impact on his career was immediate and brutal.

In December 2000, the BCCI imposed life bans on Sharma and former India captain Mohammad Azharuddin. Sharma was 36, already close to the natural end of a playing career, but the punishment went far beyond a retirement date. It cut him off almost completely from the game that had defined his life.

The ban didn’t just end his career; it erased him from the conversation. The Ranji records, the hundreds in finals, the averages that defied belief – they all slid behind the curtain of scandal.

Years later, the picture in court shifted.

In 2014, 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 during the scandal had been false. What it did was tear down the disciplinary process that had kept him on the outside for 14 years.

By then, though, the damage had travelled far beyond scorecards and selection meetings.

A father on the outside

While Sharma tried to piece together a life outside cricket – including a long stint with the Central Warehousing Corporation – his son Manan was trying to build one inside it, pushing for a place as a professional cricketer with Delhi.

Even that journey became entangled in the shadow of the 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 presence of Ajay Sharma, the man banned for life, might harm the younger cricketer’s prospects.

For someone whose identity had been bound to cricket for as long as he could remember, it was a particularly cruel twist. He was no longer just out of the dressing room; he was effectively barred from the stands, from the simple joy of watching his own child play.

The 2014 judgment reopened a legal door, but it did not magically restore his place in the game. He had to start again, far from the spotlight he once commanded with the bat.

The long road back

Coaching eventually became his route back into cricket’s inner circle.

He began in academies, learning to translate his instincts as a batter into a different skill: guiding others. That path eventually led him to the head coach’s role with Jammu and Kashmir’s senior side, a posting that would reshape the final act of his cricketing story.

It did not click immediately. Players found him too strict, too hard-edged. Sharma himself later admitted he had to change how he spoke to the group, soften his approach, if he wanted them to respond.

Once that adjustment came, something started to build.

Jammu and Kashmir, long on the fringes of the Ranji conversation, began to harden into a proper first-class outfit. They grew, season by season, into a side that believed it could stand up to the traditional heavyweights.

Then, in 2025-26, they broke through a barrier nobody in the state had crossed before.

A Ranji final no one saw coming

Jammu and Kashmir reached the Ranji Trophy final for the first time in their history. For a team that had spent decades as an afterthought, it was a staggering leap.

After the semi-final win, the players lifted Sharma onto their shoulders. The image cut sharply against the one that had followed him since 2000 – no longer the disgraced former cricketer, but the coach at the centre of a fairytale run.

The story still had one more turn.

In the final, Jammu and Kashmir faced Karnataka and claimed the title on first-innings lead, securing the Ranji Trophy for the first time. A state that had never been this far before now stood at the summit of India’s domestic game.

At the heart of it was a man whose name had once been synonymous with Ranji dominance. A batter who averaged over 80 in the competition, who had played only one Test for India, who had then been pushed to the game’s margins by a life ban and the stigma that came with it.

Now, more than two decades on, the same tournament that had made Ajay Sharma impossible to ignore had carried him back into the spotlight – not with a bat in his hand, but on the shoulders of his players.

This time he was not grinding through another marathon innings. He was the one being carried, by a team he had helped take somewhere Jammu and Kashmir had never been before.