Glenn Maxwell, after being picked up by the Royal Challengers Bangalore (RCB) last year turned his IPL career around with a smashing season. Maxwell smashed 513 runs in 15 games including six fifty-plus scores. However, the picture wasn’t all hunky-dory as the star Australian all-rounder was coming off from his worst season in the T20 League.
Maxwell had failed to hit a single six while he averaged just 15 in the whole season, playing for the then Kings XI Punjab. Opening up on the 2020 season on RCB Podcast, Maxwell said that it was a nightmare year for him even more so that every time he was coming in to bat he got less than 10 balls on several occasions and wasn’t getting much time to get his eye in.
“That was obviously a hard time, the previous two years went very good but I struggled to get momentum throughout the tournament. 2020 season was a bit of a nightmare. Nothing really went right. T20 cricket can be hard if you’re a middle-order player. You’re not getting to play a lot of balls in the middle. You’re not getting consistency. KL and Mayank were making truckloads of runs. Pooran was smacking as well, and a lot of times I ended up facing less than an over or two.”
Maxwell said that after Gayle was drafted into the side in the second half of the season, he was dropped further down but he still kept his place in the XI because of his bowling. He said that he actually asked the team management to drop him because of the number of deliveries he was getting to play, or the lack of it.
“You can train as much as you want but if you don’t have that in-game momentum, it makes it really hard for a player to rediscover himself. I was going to every game and felt like I haven’t batted for six months. Even though I was training every day, I had no rhythm whatsoever in the game. We had so many top-order batters playing well and we brought Gayle in and I was pushed another spot down the order. I actually went up myself and told them ‘you might as well not play me,” he further added.
Maxwell gave the Kings credit for staying with him throughout the season and drop him only before the final game but admitted that he doesn’t have the ability of someone like Andre Russell to go from ball one.
“I was like, ‘I might get even fewer balls and it’s going to be tougher for me.’ I’m not like Andre Russell who can come out and hit the first ball for six. I need time. To their credit, they stuck with me because I was bowling really well and was fielding and doing a lot of work with the captain and bowlers. But batting-wise, if you don’t get the rhythm early on, it’s really hard to rediscover,” said Maxwell.
