Meet Mikyo Dorji, the Bhutanese player who has registered for IPL 2022 Auction
Bhutan’s bright young talent Mikyo Dorji, the allround cricketer, is among the whopping 318 overseas players to have registered their names for the IPL 2022 Auction. Dorji is his nation’s only representative to have pushed his name up for reckoning in the biggest T20 league.
While Dorji understands he is unlikely to make the final trimmed list of players who will actually be up for bidding, the cricket dares to dream big, recognising the game-changing impact it would have on him and the entire Bhutan cricket community.
“Playing in the IPL is an ultimate dream for me. People saw that there was one player in the auction list from Bhutan and my friends started calling me. But they don’t know (laughs) that this is just the initial round, and the names are going to be shortlisted further,” said Mikyo Dorji, whose ambition is to be the one to put Bhutan cricket on the map, in an interview with The New Indian Express.
“If I am honest to myself, my name will not be there in the main list after it is trimmed. Anyways, just registering is a big deal for Bhutan.”
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Mikyo Dorji’s name has risen up the ranks as Bhutan’s most promising cricketer after he became the first from his nation to play in a league outside the border. Last year, the right-hand batter featured the Everest Premier League in Nepal. Playing for Lalitpur Patriots, Dorji played one match of the tournament and scored a quickfire 17 not out.
Dorji has a longstanding relationship and connection with Nepal, for it is against the Asian neighbours that he made his international debut via a T20I fixture in Kirtipur in December 2019.
When Mikyo Dorji met ‘MS Dhoni’
Mikyo Dorji had a chance to interact with the legendary MS Dhoni.
Mikyo Dorji has also developed a close bond and association with India, where he studied and first pursued his cricketing dreams at St Joseph’s School in Darjeeling. In India, he has also visited the MRF Pace Foundation twice in 2018 and 2019, hoping to sharpen up his bowling skills.
It is during one of these visits to Chennai that he met the city’s most celebrated adopted son in the cricketing world. Dorji got the chance to meet the great MS Dhoni. During their interaction, the cricketer revealed, Dhoni gave him some prudent advice and asked him to continue working hard over his game.
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Taking the legendary figure’s advice to heart, Mikyo Dorji has been spending extra hours at training for the last couple of years. He was also part of a camp for Bhutan players in Bengal. But the opportunities to take his game to the next level have been limited on the field.
Like several other associate members of the ICC, Bhutan has badly felt the heat because of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has led to the suspension of cricketing activities in these countries. Dorji has hardly played cricket in the last 24 months since the time the pandemic first started firming its grip over the cricketing world.
“For players like me, more than anything, I missed international cricket, where I could have learned further and developed,” said Dorji, whose immediate goal is to find more opportunities in leagues around the world so that his game improves and he can make a living out of it.
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“In the future, and I hope so, if any franchise picks a player from Bhutan, it will help a great deal here. For example, Bhutan footballer Chencho Gyeltshen plays in the Indian Super League, it has helped a lot. People and parents alike have started to realise that one can make good money and career out of such sports too. The same thing can happen in cricket too if a player from Bhutan is in the IPL,” he concluded.