How Virender Sehwag lost a fan with Glenn Maxwell – Excerpt from “The Showman” by Glenn Maxwell

With just three defeats, we finished in first place by a significant margin and earned the double chance we ultimately needed when we lost to Calcutta. We made it to the final in a top-class qualifying game. Sehwag had also joined Punjab and hit 122 off 58. I was never afraid to hit the first ball unconventionally and I tried to do that in the final too but the reverse sweep couldn't clear Morne Morkel – a bit of bad luck finding the tallest guy in the game. Staking 200 KKR to win should have been enough, but we went down in the final round. As close as possible to a perfect season in the IPL, but no trophy.

After being at the top of the table in 2014, we have now won the wooden spoon two years in a row. My own numbers have actually fallen immeasurably. The IPL is a very difficult place to be at times like this and for me the key is to learn how to prevent failure in cricket from turning into a disaster. As a younger player it was more difficult. I doubted myself, felt the negativity and saw the social media posts. I pride myself on never trying to defend myself out of a crisis, which is the most selfish thing you can do as a T20 batter, but the desire to be a match winner doesn't always make it that way.

These experiences made 2017 a big test for me. I was now making a lot of money every season, but that had little to do with my motivation – it was time to show the world that 2014 was no coincidence that I could manage the IPL again. The big boost I had towards getting back into Kings XI orbit was the Test century in Ranchi a few weeks earlier. I felt ready to make it big.

This time there was a twist. I would become captain, which is what Sehwag told me when we met during the Test series. We had played together, but now he had retreated into the role of a “mentor,” as it was described at the time. We discussed what the team would do and I thought we were all on the same page.

How wrong I was. Our coach, J Arunkumar, came for his first season and realized that he was a coach in name only and Sehwag was calling the shots. We won papers over cracks, and when we advanced in the first two games, the confusion behind the scenes was ignored. However, privately, coaches and players came to me and asked what the hell was going on, and I had a hard time giving them a straight answer.

When it came to selection, I thought it would be a good idea to get the coaches together in a WhatsApp group so they can make our decisions. Everyone agreed and divided their teams except Sehwag. At the end of the process he made it clear that he would choose the starting XI, end of story. Meanwhile, we have lost on and off the field, with Sehwag making decisions that didn't necessarily make sense on more than one occasion.

Take poor old Ishant Sharma. At some point he was told not to bother coming to our game in Mumbai that day as he hadn't been picked for a while. We had several other local bowlers and New Zealand fast bowler Matt Henry who had just come into the team. Ishant did the right thing, completed a training session and still came along to bowl at full pace during the warm-up. Eoin Morgan was then told he would be a new signing that day, taking the final foreign player spot from Matt. Morgs protested that it wasn't fair to drop Matt after he had only played one game, so they switched again, leaving Morgs out and both Henry and Ishant playing.

It was difficult to understand how the organization could be run so erratically.

The season ended with our final away game against Pune in the group and we had a shocking blow first on a wet wicket scoring 73. It was all over. In the context of what was going on, I'm still pretty proud of how we were able to largely keep the show going up to that point. I was also happy with my performance and did the right thing as a leader by giving myself the chance to influence games at the right time with bat and ball. Of course we were all desperate not to make the postseason, but it could have been a lot worse.

I volunteered to do press relations that evening, but Sehwag said he would do it instead. When I got on the team bus, I realized that I had been deleted from the main WhatsApp group. What was going on here? When we reached the hotel, my phone exploded and Sehwag accused me of being a “big disappointment”, blaming me for not taking responsibility as captain and so on. It was awkward, especially when I thought we had parted on good terms.

I texted him to tell him how much it hurt to read those comments and added that he had lost a fan in me because of his behavior. Sehwag's response was simple: “I don't need a fan like you.” We never spoke again. I knew my time was over and told the owners too: if Sehwag stayed here, they would have made a mistake and not taken care of me. He only lasted one more season.

By the time I entered my thirties, I had experienced the best and worst that the IPL had to offer. A fallow season in Delhi in 2018 was frustrating as I wanted to make it work for punter (Ricky Ponting), who was now my coach. There was so much else going on this year, which I will discuss in more detail in a later chapter, that I was perhaps doomed to miss out.

As for the pandemic season being postponed to the end of 2020, I found myself back with Kings XI in the post-Sehwag era. But I couldn't do a trick. Not for lack of trying, I failed to clear the rope throughout the tournament, which became a joke on the internet and grew from game to game. When I returned home for a one-day match against India straight after the tournament with nine balls to spare, I had the sweet sensation of a ball coming out of the middle for six. I added two more in a minute. As I turned around, I remembered that my Kings captain KL Rahul was behind the stumps for India. The expression on his face is best described as “What the f***?” All I could do was shrug my shoulders and apologize. At some point you have to surrender to the reality of who you are. It's me.

But I still felt like there had to be a twist to this story, and there was. Who should I thank? Virat Kohli. On the same tour of Australia, he wanted to whisper an idea to me: he, me and AB de Villiers should be the middle order at Royal Challengers Bangalore in 2021. I was excited about it before he finished his sentence. Having started with Sachin and Ricky, the chance to bat with my generation's equivalents, in those gold cushions no less, was irresistible.

There had been auctions before and they were over again. This time, however, I was obsessed. When the bat came for me from RCB, I was the happiest cricketer in the world. In Bangalore I started my second role as a player. And it is what I learned in the colors of Bangalore that would enable me to play the most important cricket of my life.

This is an excerpt from The showman by Glenn Maxwell, published by Simon and Schuster, available in bookstores and online from October 30th

How Virender Sehwag lost a fan with Glenn Maxwell – Excerpt from “The Showman” by Glenn Maxwell

ByVanessa

By Vanessa

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