There are domestic records that hint at bad luck. 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, he went beyond prolific into something close to mythical: 7,319 runs at 80.42, 31 hundreds, and a habit of turning up when the trophy was on the line. Four centuries in six Ranji finals. A man who treated pressure like a personal invitation.
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 16 wickets. Sharma’s 53 runs disappeared into the footnotes. So did he.
He never played another Test.
The Ranji colossus India barely knew
While Sachin Tendulkar and a new generation of Indian batters became household names through the 1990s, Sharma did his work in quieter arenas. Delhi’s dressing room knew. Domestic bowlers knew. Scorecards knew.
Everyone else moved on.
He had a longer go in ODIs – 31 matches between 1988 and 1993 – but the numbers there never sang in the same register. He scored 424 runs at 20.19, with three fifties, and chipped in with slow left-arm spin. Useful, occasionally important, never irresistible.
Domestic cricket told a very different story.
In 1991-92, he piled up 933 runs and then finished the season with 175 in the Ranji final against Tamil Nadu, dragging Delhi to the title. Three years later, he hammered 1,288 first-class runs at 92, as if to underline that being ignored by India hadn’t dulled his appetite; it had sharpened it.
Then came 1996-97, the season that turned his Ranji record into something almost surreal. Eight matches. 1,033 runs. Average: 114.78. Five centuries, three fifties. Bowlers ran into him knowing the odds were stacked against them, and still he kept cashing in.
By the time his first-class career closed – 10,120 runs from 129 matches, 38 hundreds, average 67.46 – he had climbed into rare air. Among batters with serious volume, only a handful of historical greats have finished with a better average.
Yet he remained the answer to a quiz question: one Test, two innings, no recall.
And then, almost as suddenly as he had vanished from the India team sheet, he vanished from cricket’s mainstream memory for a much darker reason.
The scandal that erased a career
In 2000, Indian cricket was dragged into the match-fixing storm that followed the Hansie Cronje revelations. The CBI investigation dug into links between players and bookmakers. Ajay Sharma’s name surfaced.
The allegations centred on associations with bookmakers and introductions involving other players. Sharma denied taking money to fix matches, but once his name entered that conversation, the damage was instant.
In December 2000, the BCCI handed life bans to Sharma and former India captain Mohammad Azharuddin. Sharma was 36. His playing days were already winding down. The ban, though, did more than end a career. It cut him off from the game that had defined him.
He disappeared from the cricketing landscape.
Years later, the legal picture 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 in the scandal had been fabricated. It was a legal takedown of the disciplinary process and the ban that had followed.
The door back into organised cricket opened a fraction. But the cost of those 14 years was already everywhere in his life.
The stigma spread. It touched his family. His son, Manan, began to climb the ranks as a professional cricketer with Delhi. Even that journey became tangled with the shadow over his father’s name. Sharma would later recall asking if he could come to the ground to watch his son play. Manan told him not to. The fear was simple and brutal: his presence might hurt his son’s career.
For a man whose identity had been wrapped in cricket for decades, that was perhaps the cruellest blow of all. He could not even sit in the stands and watch his own child.
So he stepped away. He worked outside the sport, including a long stint with the Central Warehousing Corporation. The game moved on without him. Even after the 2014 judgment, there was no red-carpet return. No rush to bring him back into the fold. He had to start again, from the margins.
The Ranji ending nobody could have plotted
The route back came through coaching.
Sharma began in academies, learning a new craft, then took charge of Jammu and Kashmir’s senior side. It was an unlikely pairing on paper: a disgraced former India batter and a team that had never been close to the sharp end of the Ranji Trophy.
It did not click straight away. Players found him too strict, too hard-edged. Sharma himself later admitted he needed to change how he spoke to the group, to soften the delivery without losing the standards. A man who had spent his playing days demanding more of himself now had to learn how to demand more of others.
Slowly, the shift came.
Jammu and Kashmir toughened up. They became competitive, then awkward opponents, then something more. The results began to hint at a team shedding its old skin.
By 2025-26, they tore through the ceiling.
Jammu and Kashmir reached the Ranji Trophy final for the first time in their history. A side that had long lived on the fringes of the competition suddenly stood one match away from the title. After the semi-final win, the players lifted Sharma onto their shoulders.
For two decades, the enduring image of Ajay Sharma had been that of a man banned, tainted, shut out. Here he was again, high above a group of cricketers, but for a very different reason.
Then came the final step.
Facing Karnataka, Jammu and Kashmir claimed the Ranji Trophy on first-innings lead. No last-day miracle chase, no dramatic collapse – just the cold, hard advantage that matters in a final. It was their first Ranji title. A state that had never been here before now sat on top of India’s premier domestic competition.
At the heart of it stood a coach whose own life had been intertwined with this tournament like few others. Ajay Sharma, the batter who had once averaged more than 80 in Ranji cricket yet played only one Test. Ajay Sharma, the man whose name had been dragged through the match-fixing scandal and locked out of the game for years.
The symmetry was impossible to ignore.
The same competition that had once made him unignorable as a player now restored him to the spotlight as a coach. He was no longer the man batting through another marathon innings. This time, his players carried him – literally – to a place Jammu and Kashmir had never been.
For a career that seemed to have been written off long ago, the Ranji Trophy has given Ajay Sharma something far more powerful than numbers: a final act.
