Karn Sharma played four times for India, and won three straight IPL titles with three different teams
Karn Sharma has retired at 38 with four India caps, four IPL winners’ medals and 270 first-class wickets. He is still the only player to win three IPL titles in a row with three different teams.
Aug 24, 2026
Karn Sharma has retired from international and Indian domestic cricket at 38. The legspinner made the announcement on Saturday night, after a UP T20 League game between Kanpur Superstars and Meerut Mavericks, and will play his last competitive match when the tournament’s Lucknow leg wraps up on 25 August.
He leaves with four India caps and four IPL winners’ medals. That ratio tells most of the story. Karn spent a decade in dressing rooms full of internationals without ever getting back into one himself.
“I now want to retire,” he said. “I am extremely grateful to my family, BCCI, Railways, UPCA, Andhra, Vidarbha Cricket Association and everyone who has supported me throughout this journey. After this, I will be available for coaching and other responsibilities related to the game of cricket.”
Four matches for India, all of them in 2014
One Test, two ODIs, one T20I. Every appearance came inside four months of a single year, and then the door shut.
The T20I came first, at Edgbaston on 7 September 2014, where he bowled his four overs for 28 and had Joe Root caught. That is still his only white-ball wicket for India. His ODI debut, on 13 November at Eden Gardens, was a match nobody remembers him for: Rohit Sharma made 264 that afternoon, India posted 404 for 5, and Karn went wicketless. He did not take one in the second ODI at Ranchi either.
The Test was the good one. India chose him over R Ashwin for the Adelaide Test that began on 9 December 2014, and he took two wickets in each innings. All four were serious names. David Warner, his Sunrisers Hyderabad team-mate, fell to him twice, on 145 in the first innings and 102 in the second. Michael Clarke was the other first-innings wicket, for 128.
He never played for India again. Picked for the limited-overs tour of Zimbabwe in 2015, he fractured a finger on his left hand and was ruled out without a replacement being named. The call never came back.
Three titles in three years with three different teams
The IPL treated him better. Sunrisers Hyderabad paid INR 3.75 crore for him at the 2014 auction, the most any uncapped Indian had fetched to that point, on the back of 11 wickets in 13 games for them in 2013. He repaid it with 15 wickets at 25.06 that season.
Then came the run that turned him into a quiz answer. Sunrisers won the title in 2016 with Karn in their squad. He moved to Mumbai Indians and won it again in 2017. He joined Chennai Super Kings and made it three in a row in 2018. Nobody else has won three consecutive IPL titles at three different clubs. Suyash Sharma and Phil Salt have since matched the three-in-a-row part, with Kolkata in 2024 and Bengaluru in 2025 and 2026, but that is two clubs between them, not three.
A fourth medal arrived with Chennai in 2021. Across 90 IPL matches for four franchises he took 83 wickets at 26.68, and his last game in the competition came in 2025, back at Mumbai Indians.
The Railways career underneath it all
Those medals sat on top of nineteen years of domestic cricket, most of it for Railways. He walked out for his Ranji Trophy debut in November 2007 as a specialist batsman and scored 120 against Jammu and Kashmir. The bowling took over later. In 2012-13 he took 21 wickets at 19.04 from three Ranji matches, including an eight-wicket haul against defending champions Rajasthan, and won the BCCI’s Best Under-25 Cricketer award.
He finishes with 270 first-class wickets at 27.60 from 97 matches, 14 five-fors among them, plus 2,866 runs with two hundreds and 17 fifties. There are 153 wickets in 123 List A games and 168 in 191 T20s. A season with Vidarbha in 2017-18 and one with Andhra in 2018-19 broke up the Railways years, and he was still turning out for them in January this year, when he took 5 for 87 against Gujarat.
Coaching is what he says comes next. Four caps, four medals, 270 first-class wickets: an odd shape for a career, and a longer one than most legspinners get.