Our Stories – Neeraj Tyagi

December 14, 2020 1:51 pm +00:00

Our Stories – Neeraj Tyagi

I was born and raised in Delhi, the capital of India. I have been playing cricket since childhood. I probably started playing when I was about six years old, and I stopped sometime after graduation. In India, like football in Europe, cricket is everywhere. Everywhere you see adults or children playing cricket: on the street, in public places, everywhere.

There I completed my education in the field of engineering and now I am based in Prague. I came to Prague 3 years ago working at Accenture. I started playing cricket again in the corporate leagues at Accenture and I played in various cricket clubs around Prague. I joined MSD last year in December because MSD performed very well in medicine, had a good reputation with Keytruda, and was benefiting cancer patients.

In July there was a European Cricket Network Series in cooperation with Dream11, which is an Indian company that takes care of the legal betting in leagues. They were organizing all of the European tournaments and luckily, there are 16 teams participating in the Czech Republic for this ECN-Prague series. We started our own club within MSD last year. From there onwards, we won indoor tournaments, the 40 Overs division, and this year I led one of the teams and we placed 3rd out of the 16 teams in the country.

When you lead a cricket team, you have to manage 11 players on the ground. You have to make a strategy, know who a good bowler will be to start innings with, and you have to think about the match a few days in advance to prepare. It’s a great experience to lead a team because it also makes an impact on how you lead in your work environment. Somewhere in the future, everyone will have to lead a team in some way and it’s great to look for opportunities anywhere, such as in sports or another hobby, to prepare for that.

Cricket may not be as widely popular globally as other sports, such as football or tennis, but it’s a very amazing sport and you never know what is going to happen next. One inning could last for hours. But it’s not so much about cricket, as it is about sportsmanship. When the MSD team formed there were only a few players, but now there are 12. In the club, there are over 20. More partners began to join, and we met colleagues that we might not have met otherwise and formed a good community. If anyone from MSD in Prague or the Czech Republic wants to join our team, we are always happy to have them and they can reach out to me.

– Neeraj Tyagi