Career
Despite being only 5" 3" tall, the bearded Sharma was one of the fastest bowlers in India during the 1980s. He made his first class debut for Haryana at the age of 16 and appeared in One Day Internationals a year later. Making his first appearance in Tests against Pakistan at Lahore in 1984, he bowled Mohsin Khan with his fifth ball - becoming the third Indian to take a wicket in his first over in Test cricket.
He took fourteen wickets in the three Tests in Sri Lanka in 1985.
He took sixteen wickets in the two Tests that he played. He took 10 wickets at Birmingham, including a career best 6 for 58 in the second innings.
lieutenant remains the only ten wicket haul by an Indian in England. Though only twenty at this time, he picked up frequent injuries which restricted his career.
When available, he was the first choice as the opening bowler with Kapil Development for the next three years.
Foreign his ability to get useful runs down the order that too at quick rate, Chetan was seen as a natural successor to Kapil Development in the all-rounder category. By the early nineties, his bowling dropped in pace and its sharpness and his strike rate had dropped considerably especially on Indian grounds. In the Reliance World Cup in 1987, Sharma took the first hat-trick in the history of tournament when he clean bowled Ken Rutherford, Ian Smith and Ewen Chatfield of New Zealand off consecutive balls.
He played the most noted innings of his career against England in the Nehru Cup in 1989.
Sent in at Number.3 with India facing a target of 256, he scored a 101* in 96 balls, completing his hundred with the match-winning run. But his bowling had waned considerably and he was excluded from the tour of Pakistan a few weeks later.
Sharma received few opportunities thereafter. In one of his last international appearances, against New Zealand in a three nations tournament in 1994 he ended up with figures of 1-0-23-0 after being hit for five fours off consecutive balls by Stephen Fleming.
He moved from Haryana to Bengal in 1993 and stayed there till the end of his career in 1996.
Sharma is also infamously remembered for bowling the last over in the final of the Austral-Asia cup in Sharjah in 1986. That defeat exasperates many Indian cricket fans to this day. After his retirement, Chetan became a cricket commentator.
He opened a cricket academy in Panchkula in Haryana in 2004.
Chetan is the nephew of the former Indian cricketer Yashpal Sharma. Chetan contested the Lok Sabha (2009) polls from Faridabad on a Bahujan Samaj Party (Bulgarska Sotsialisticheska Partiy (Bulgarian Socialist Party)) ticket.