Royal Challengers Bengaluru allrounder Glenn Maxwell preferred to take a break from the ongoing IPL to refresh himself physically as well as mentally and requested the team management to pick someone else in his place for the match against SRH.
Since the start of the season, Maxwell has been struggling to score with bat. Before the SRH clash, Maxwell had scored only 32 runs in six innings at an average of 5.33.
After he missed out the playing 11 for the SRH game, many conclude that he might have sat out because of a thumb injury but that was not the case. Glenn Maxwell revealed that he voluntarily opted to be out of the game.
“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.
“We have had a pretty big deficiency straight after the powerplay, which has been my area of strength over the last couple of seasons. I felt like I wasn’t contributing in a positive way with the bat, and with the results and the position we find ourselves on the table, I think it’s a good time to give someone else an opportunity to show their wares, and hopefully, someone can make that spot their own.”
Prior to his downfall this season, Maxwell had an impressive outing with RCB between 2021 and 2023. The allrounder scored 513 runs at 144.10, 301 runs at 169.1 and 400 runs at 183.49 in IPL 2021, 2022 and 2023 respectively.
Ahead of the start of the IPL 2024, Maxwell was in red-hot form. since the start of November, Maxwell played 17 T20s and scored 552 runs at an average of 42.46 and a strike rate of 185.85. During this period, he scored two hundreds as well.
But the allrounder started the IPL 2024 campaign with a first-ball duck against Chennai Super Kings. Since then, Maxwell ended up bagging two more ducks and has lasted more than five balls only once – against Kolkata Knight Riders, where he scored a 19-ball 28 with the help of two dropped catches.
“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.”
This is not the first time for the all-rounder to slump in his form. Earlier in the IPL 2020 season while playing for Kings XI Punjab, Maxwell managed a score just 108 runs in 13 matches at a strike rate of 101.88 and maintained an average of 15.42. Notably, he did not hit a single six that year.
“That was probably a different scenario,” Maxwell said of the 2020 season. “Back then the thing that was hurting me was I was bowling really well. So I was actually playing more as a spinner who was used at the back end [while batting]. We had KL [Rahul] and Mayank [Agarwal] who were the two leading run-scorers in the competition at that time, so there wasn’t a lot of balls left in the game. So I wasn’t able to get any match rhythm. And when I was, it was only for a few balls here and there.
“So I said the same thing to the Kings XI management back at the time, that we can have an overseas bowler in my place. But we didn’t have an offspinner as well. So I sort of played as an overseas offspinner who could bat a little bit.
“The management here has been outstanding. We’ve been working together on taking a fair bit of ownership and the off-field leadership staff is trying to help out as much as they can. Unfortunately, runs just haven’t come the way they should have when you are in really good form.
I don’t think I’ve had a better six months in cricket leading into this tournament. So it’s frustrating when it ends up like this. But if I can get my body and my mind right, there’s no reason I can’t finish the tournament well if I do get another opportunity.”
Royal Challengers Bengaluru will play their next game of the season against Kolkata Knight Riders on April 21 in Eden Gardens, Kolkata.
