Shattered Maxwell laments crash

GLENN Maxwell wouldn’t call it a choke. But the Melbourne Stars captain couldn’t escape the fact his team crumbled in the worst possible way to lose what seemed an unlosable Big Bash final.

Maxwell was “pretty shattered” after his team raced to 0-93, chasing 146 for a first-ever BBL title, before losing 7-19 to fall 14 runs short.

Conceding he probably would have batted first if he had his time over again, after choosing to bowl when he won the bat flip, Maxwell said the loss wouldn’t leave him any time soon. “This will probably drive us next year, and we can use it as good motivation to go one step further,” he said.

“We were so close. For eight overs it looked like we were winners. It’s hard to take right now.”

Rather than point the finger at his batsmen, with five of the top seven failing to pass six after the solid start, Maxwell gave credit to the Renegades’ bowlers. He said his openers, Ben Dunk (57) and Marcus Stoinis (39), could have “killed the game earlier” because the chase was never as easy as it looked.

“With the way the game was going, the way they were throwing the ball into the ground, getting the ball soft, it was going to be harder for a new batter to start,” he said. “You could feel that on the boundary, we needed to kill the game a little bit earlier, go harder at the start while the ball was hard and just get ahead of the run rate.

“You can kill games in the powerplay when you are chasing scores like that ... but it was that sort of game, we probably needed to go harder. That’s all in hindsight. We didn’t get off to a flyer, they executed and were able to build up enough pressure to make it hard for us.

“We just couldn’t have a batter come in and do the job. It seemed like every time we had someone come in and take a risk they got out.

“I thought we did well with the ball, executed well, did everything right. And up until the 12th over [with the bat] I thought we were fine.

“I’m pretty shattered to be honest.”