‘It feels almost wrong,” says Naavya Sharma, the 20-year-old Middlesex seamer, future England hopeful, and second-year maths student at Warwick University.
“Generally it would be in the changing room,” he says of his revision habits. “We’ll bowl a team out, then when our openers go out I just get my notes. I’ve had my notes out on the Lord’s balcony, and it’s like, this is really, really niche. It’s not something many people get to do.”
Sharma is busier than you are at the moment. As we speak over the phone on a Tuesday, he explains he has a combinatorics exam tomorrow (nope, me neither), a modelling exam on Thursday (can just about do that one), he’s in the squad for Middlesex v Durham on Friday (do know this one) and that will take him through to Monday. “And then there’s another exam on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday the week after,” he says. “Then I think there’s five more in June.”
Mercifully, when Middlesex announced their team on Friday morning, Sharma had been given the week off. The boy needs to read. “Since I got my first professional contract,” he says. “Cricket has always been Plan A but I just want a back-up and to have a degree. There’s so much uncertainty and it’s such a competitive world, that a degree is almost the most normal route to go down.”
Sharma is one of two promising young seamers at Middlesex, along with Sebastian Morgan, who this season have immediately settled into first-team rotation. Both made their first-team debuts last year, but it is the undramatic competence with which both have started this season that has caught the eye. To have one young England Under-19 seamer you can rely on is a treat, to have two is a blessing.
“We’ve played a lot of cricket together since we were about 11,” says Sharma, who is an academic year ahead. “It’s really nice to have a familiar face going up together.”
Like Sharma, Morgan will spend the next three years balancing cricket with a degree, as he is off to Durham University in September to study chemistry. “I’m not sure how he’s going to go about it,” Sharma. “But I’m sure he’ll manage. He’s good with these things.”
Sharma’s career progression has so far been steady. He kicked on at 16 when he was selected for the Middlesex Academy after playing age-group cricket for Berkshire, and he is an oddity in the modern game as a fast bowler who looks to swing the ball as much as seam it.
Recent years have seen the “wobble-seam” ball increase in popularity as fast bowlers look to make the ball react off the surface and deviate left or right. Sharma is a bowler from a previous era, a highly skilled operator who can swing the ball in both directions. “At this stage of my career,” he says, “it’s about how I can push every facet of my game to whatever it can get to. So trying to push the speedgun as high as it can and one day, yeah, maybe hit 90mph. But all while trying to maintain as much skill as you can. Trying to move the ball both ways at pace is probably the hardest thing to face in cricket.
“So I’m not going to pigeonhole myself into ‘I’m just going to become a low 80s, move-it-around bowler’, or, ‘I’m just going to become an out-and-out quick that doesn’t move the ball’. I just want to push every aspect of my game and then almost work it out as I go along.”
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Any and all progress in Sharma’s career will also carry a heavy headline. He is blessed, but potentially also cursed, with the same hypermobility in his elbow that Indian bowling legend Jasprit Bumrah has. A trait which is often cited as the cause of Bumrah’s distinctive action and success.
“I’m obviously galaxies away from the guy at the moment,” says Sharma, whose first-class career is still only six games young. “But I think that’s what I eventually want to work towards.”
If Sharma wasn’t busy enough, he also continues to turn out for his club side, Sunbury CC. The club have a long history of producing Middlesex players, with veteran seamer Toby Roland-Jones also a former player there. Last season, there was one scorecard in particular worth noting. Against Spencer CC in the Surrey Championship, Sharma walked out alongside 21-year-old Australian Hugh Weibgen, the club’s overseas player who is tipped for a long career for Australia, and Sharma’s Middlesex team-mate Caleb Falconer, who earlier this year hit 115 off 67 balls in the Under-19 World Cup final. In Spencer’s XI was England’s Gus Atkinson.
“Hugh, I would think, will play for Australia one day for sure,” says Sharma. “And obviously me and Caleb are good mates and both of us have aspirations of converting England U19 stuff into senior men’s stuff. So that would be pretty cool if we had four guys playing in a club game that all end up playing, if we can be optimistic, even in an Ashes.”
And at this stage of Sharma’s career, there’s no reason to be anything but.
Photograph by Andy Kearns/Getty Images