Glenn goes from boring to brilliant
IN just over 100 days of a career-defining summer, Glenn Maxwell has racked up just over 1000 runs, all the while taking so many knocks he’d need Rocky Balboa to talk him through it.
The brilliant batsman has faced hit after hit through a perennially interrupted international career which has mixed brilliance with brainfades at opposite ends of the performance spectrum with sizeable scrutiny to match.
But perhaps no whacks were more punishing than those during this summer.
This time they seemed like knockout blows.
It was supposed to be cashing-in time after all that hard work done in tough situations, scoring his maiden Test ton through gritty defiance in India.
But then came the first whack.
He was not so much exited from the Test team as thrown out, his Ashes dream denied.
On the back of that ugly deletion from national consideration, the anti-Maxwell voices started stirring the pot again.
He was unreliable, too inconsistent and the coach, Darren Lehmann, just did not like him. The Victorian apparently did, and said, too many things that weren’t obviously wrong, but the wrong way.
Word started to spread that Maxwell didn’t fit the cultural ensemble Aussie captain Steve Smith felt comfortable with, no matter how many runs he made.
All that, however, was confusing news to the man himself, and seemed in contrast to his new approach to the game.
He certainly didn’t enjoy missing the Test squad when it was announced last November, and had some really emotional time with his family after that happened.
That counted double when Aussie captain Smith told the nation Maxwell had to “train smarter” after booting him from the one-day squad. Yet another whack On that occasion, confusion was the overwhelming emotion. But in neither instance did Maxwell lash out, nor did he move away from what had been working for him. That wasn’t the new way. And the base from which he has finally re-assumed his place among the Aussie elite, a position franked by a matchwinning international T20 hundred, is a boring one.
“I don’t think Maxy has ever been a lazy trainer, he just hasn’t trained like the absolute greats. In the last 12 months he has done that,” said Trent Woodhill, list manager at the Melbourne Stars and a revered batting coach who has worked with the game’s best players. “It might sound boring, but he now has a really set routine in what he does, and it’s allowed that consistency of form.”
Woodhill said, in the national set-up, maybe it was too often a case of Maxwell bending to fit their ideals, when it should have been the other way around.
“Just because it’s the Australian team, you shouldn’t be asking talent – and Glenn is top three in the country – to fit in,” he said.
“We should be asking him what he needs to get that performance.”