(Cricket News) The maverick Australian all-rounder, Glenn Maxwell voluntarily asked the RCB management to be left out ahead of the SRH clash in order to give himself a mental and physical break. Maxwell has had a forgettable start to the season failing miserably with the bat. He has aggregated just 32 runs from six innings at an average of 5.33.
“For me, personally, it was a pretty easy decision,” Maxwell said on Monday (April 15) addressing the press conference after RCB’s sixth defeat in seven games. “I went to Faf [du Plessis] and the coaches after the last game and said I felt it was probably time we tried someone else. I have been in this situation in the past where you can keep playing and get yourself deeper into a hole.
‘I think now is actually a good time for me to give myself a bit of a mental and physical break, get my body right. If I’m required to get in during the tournament, I can hopefully get back into a really solid mental and physical space where I can still have an impact,’ he added.
Maxwell also opened up about his dip in form and the fickle nature of the shortest format of the game, coming in the season opener against the Chennai Super Kings. He was dismissed by Mustafizur Rahman for a first ball duck at Chepauk in the first game of he season. The Aussie entered the tournament on the back of two spectacular hundreds against India and West Indies. He also had a decent run in the BBL where he scored 244 runs from nine innings at a strike-rate of 173.57.
“T20 cricket can be like that sometimes – it’s a pretty fickle game,” he reflected. “Even if you look at the first game, I ran one off the middle of the bat to the keeper. I picked up the length really well, saw a scoring opportunity, but opened the face a little bit too much. When you are going well, that goes wide of the gloves, you get a boundary, you are 4 off 1, and you are away for the tournament.
“I probably just haven’t got away – it’s as simple as that. In the first few games, I feel I made reasonably good decisions, but I was still finding ways to get out. It can happen in T20 cricket and when it snowballs like that, you can go searching and try too hard and forget the basics of the game.”
Maxwell has had some impressive seasons with the RCB from 2021 to 2023. He has scored 513 runs at 144.10, 301 runs at 169.1 and 400 runs at 183.49 between 2021 and 2023 respectively. RCB showed a lot of faith in Maxwell when they picked him up in the 2021 auction for a whopping 14.25 Cr. The buy came after a lot of failures of the Aussie star in the IPL. He had below par seasons since 2014 and still managed to grab a huge amount.
He was also asked if, in hindsight, he wished he had played one more game before this decision to rest. “I did notice during the powerplay that the pitch was not as slow and two-paced as it has been in the first few games,” Maxwell replied. “And I realised it was probably a bad game to miss; it would have been nice to be out there batting.
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