Why Glenn Maxwell and Virender Sehwag never spoke again after an IPL season

New Delhi: Glenn Maxwell and Virender Sehwag, two explosive batters from Australia and India respectively, were once teammates during Kings XI Punjab's journey to the IPL final in 2014. However, their relationship took a sour turn in the following years.

Glenn Maxwell has extracted some details on the breakdown of the relationship during the IPL 2017. It was back in past in 2017 when Punjab finished top by a healthy margin and earned the double chance, which we ended up needing on losing to Kolkata. Punjab won through to the final in a high-scoring qualifier. Virender Sehwag had also joined Punjab and he smashed 122 off 58, Glenn Maxwell was quite shy when he saw the unconventional shot first ball, and that’s the shot which Glenn Maxwell also tried in the final, but the reverse-sweep did not crear Morne Morkel, a touch unlucky to find the tallest bloke in the game. Setting KKR 200 for victory should have been enough but we went down in the final over. As close to the perfect season as you get in the IPL, but no trophy.

“I was player of the tournament with 552 runs – I’d ridden the wave, hit more sixes than anyone, and was told clearly that the franchise was going to be built around me to go one step better. But just as I’m prone to runs of great form, it usually runs the other way as well – when I’m in a rut, it takes some breaking. Having topped the table in 2014, we collected the wooden spoon two years running. My own numbers, sure enough, went off a cliff. The IPL is such a difficult place to be at times like this, and for me, the key has been learning how to avoid inflating cricketing failure into a catastrophe. As a younger player, this was more difficult. I doubted myself, felt the negativity, and saw the social media posts. I’m proud of never trying to defend my way out of a funk, which is the most selfish thing you can do as a T20 batter, but willing myself to be a match-winner doesn’t always make it so,” said Glenn Maxwell.

“These experiences combined to make 2017 a huge test for me. By now, I was earning plenty of money each season but that had little to do with my motivation – it was time to demonstrate to the world that 2014 wasn’t a fluke, that I could boss the IPL again. The big boost I had on the way back into the Kings XI orbit was that Test century in Ranchi a few weeks before. I felt primed to go big. This time there was a twist. I was going to be captain, which Sehwag told me when we met during the Test series. We had played together, but now he had retired into what was described at the time as a “mentor” role. We discussed how the team would operate and I thought we were all on the same page. How wrong I was. Our coach, J Arunkumar, was coming in for his first season, and it became clear to him that he was coach in name only, with Sehwag pulling the strings. Winning papers over cracks, and as we got up in the first two games, the confusion behind the scenes was ignored. Privately, though, I had coaches and players coming to me asking what on earth was going on, and I found it difficult to give them a straight answer,” he added.

“When it came to selection, I thought it might be a good idea to bring the coaches into a WhatsApp group to make our decisions. Everyone agreed to this and shared their teams, with the exception of Sehwag. At the end of the process, he made it clear that he would pick the starting XI, end of story. We were losing on and off the field by now, with Sehwag on more than one occasion making decisions that didn’t necessarily make sense,” the Australian cricketer said.

“The season came down to our final group game against Pune away from home, and we had a shocker batting first on a wet wicket, rolled for 73. It was all over. In the context of what was going on, I’m still quite proud of how we were able to broadly keep the show on the road until that stage. I was also happy with how I performed, doing the right thing as leader by giving myself the chance to influence games at the right time with bat and ball. Of course, we were all flat not to make the post-season, but it could have been so much worse,” he added.

“I volunteered to do press that night, but Sehwag said he would instead. Upon getting onto the team bus, I found I’d been deleted from the main WhatsApp group. What was going on here? By the time we reached the hotel my phone was blowing up, with Sehwag having unloaded on me as a “big disappointment”, blaming me for not taking responsibility as captain, and all the rest. It was unpleasant, especially when I thought we had parted on good terms,” The Aussie star batter said.

“I texted him to say how much it hurt to read those comments and added that he had lost a fan in me for the way he had conducted himself. Sehwag’s response was simple: “Don’t need fan like you.” We never spoke again. I knew my time was at an end and told the owners as much: if Sehwag was going to stick around, they were making a mistake and not to bother with me. He only lasted one more season. Entering my thirties, I’d experienced the best and worst of what the IPL had to offer. A fallow season in 2018 back at Delhi was frustrating, as I wanted to make it work for Punter [Ricky Ponting], who by now was my coach. There was so much else going on that year, which I’ll detail in a later chapter, that maybe I was destined to miss out,” he added.