I Read Glenn Maxwell's Book So You Don't Have To....

But, says GH, you should

Our podcast guest today is Glenn Maxwell, talking about his new book The Showman. Though cricket autobiographies and diaries used to festoon the bookshop, they haven’t lately. Since Steve Smith in 2017, only Tim Paine has committed his thoughts to paper, via Cricket Et Al’s Peter Lalor. Otherwise, Australian cricketers have been content to communicate communally, via The Test, rather than court individual scrutiny. I dare say that Sandpapergate queered a few potential projects. Everyone, of course, now mumbles behind their hands about David Warner’s putative testimony, although as I understand it Nathan Lyon will get there first. Anyway, that would make The Showman a significant book even were it not about one of the game’s most intriguing, even enigmatic figures.

The good thing is that Maxwell chose his co-author, Adam Collins, and editor, Geoff Lemon, wisely. They are badgers after his own heart. And for all Maxwell’s mercurial temperament and finger-tip feel for the game, he is disarmingly good at describing how he’s done what he’s done, and how he does what he does. Want to hear about his double-century against Afghanistan? You won’t get a better account than Maxwell’s own. It’s like having Phar Lap talk you through the 1930 Melbourne Cup. About Maxwell’s doubts and setbacks, meanwhile, the co-authors have shown commendable candour, and because, perhaps, these interest me more, I have chosen this sample of five.

1/ In 2008, teenage Glenn Maxwell, like a lot of young Aussie aspirants, set off for a northern season: he represented a club called Saham Toney CC, near Norwich.  He had his first experience of both English conditions and of ‘a really bad run with what I now understand to be depression’ - he was lucky to be able to turn to his older brother.  Depression lurks in the corners of The Showman, without coming fully into the light, but it’s clear that what we can probably type as a low-level endogenous disorder has at times chipped away at an otherwise boundless confidence. 

The fact that it peaked immediately after making a century should have been a sign that it had very little to do with cricket, and much more to do with a chemical imbalance. I sobbed to my brother – it all came out. 

In hindsight, that should have been when I put in place the type of processes that I have now. Things to help when my brain gets the better of me, often for no reason at all. But this wasn’t talked about in the game then, not in the way it is these days. It would be years later before I had to figure that out. 

I’d like to have heard more on this subject because it is a valuable corrective to the idea that depression and/or anxiety is always career ending - viz Marcus Trescothick, Mike Yardy, Praveen Kumar. Mental health difficulties are generally more pervasive and more chronic - besetting but manageable. Anyway, I think that Maxwell is the first Australian to deal with such a condition not specifically related to performance or circumstance, and for this he deserves our thanks.

2/ Ten years have elapsed since the death of Philip Hughes.  Maxwell brings back the sensations of that summer vividly - not just the moment itself, but the long tail of its aftermath.  ‘The best way to sum up that 2014–15 home summer is that we played because we were made to, not through any desire,’ he says. ‘My results weren’t there in any game I was playing. I hadn’t quarantined the grief as well as others, and it was showing in all sorts of ways.’  And he goes into this, aptly described by Adam Gilchrist as ‘the most extraordinary dismissal I’ve ever seen in the game.’

The low point was a Big Bash game at the Gabba. A few days after Christmas, in the era when the BBL was must-see-TV, we were chasing 165 and I was coming in at three inside the first over to face Ryan Duffield. No offence to the left-armer, he was a good cricketer, but his career was a modest one, so there was nothing about him that should have caused me panic. Regardless, I totally froze. His first ball came down, I backed away, then inexplicably left it alone. It bowled me middle stump. What was going on? Those who loudly speculated that I was cooked were just about right. The clip went round the world and I couldn’t get away from it. 

Only a month had elapsed since Hughes’s death, yet nobody seemed to recognise the dismissal as a spasm of the stored-up trauma in Maxwell’s system, also reflected in what he describes as a general apathy and uninterest in the game. To be fair, neither did Maxwell, for he had recourse to Ricky Ponting, who issued very Pontingesque advice:

I was as vulnerable with Punter as I had been with anyone, letting him into how little motivation I had. He replied that this wasn’t something that had ever happened to him, but suggested a remedy: for me to pick a fight with the opposition right away. In my next outing with the Stars I did just that. Ben Hilfenhaus is a lovely bloke with whom I had no beef, but I ran at him and hit a furious boundary. It’ll sound like I’m putting an awful lot of weight on one delivery, but in that moment I did feel liberated and finally turned the corner.

I’ve always wondered whether, over the next few years, the aggression and abrasion that the Australian team grew to exhibit wasn’t an attempt to neutralise or override the horror of Philip’s death.  They played at times like angry men, not least in South Africa in 2018, whereas New Zealand, perhaps through being slightly shielded from the event, took the opposite approach.  I explored this last year. It is pure conjecture, but I have some feeling for how trauma can curdle into anger.

3/ One of the more troubling episodes in The Showman concerns a net session at Old Trafford during the 2019 World Cup, where Maxwell was almost badly injured and Shaun Marsh was.  As depicted in series 1 of The Test, the incident ended Marsh’s international career. ‘I’m 36,’ he lamented. ‘The World Cup might have been the last time I play in the Australian cricket team, and for it to end with a broken arm was definitely really disappointing.’  But the way The Showman describes it, Marsh was almost collateral damage for an interrogation of Maxwell.

This day was different. In my net, I got a proper full-tilt short ball from Starcy and ducked it. Okay, a touch unusual, but play on. Next, something even more potent from Patty from back of a length that reared up and hit me in the middle of the forearm. I threw the bat and walked out of the net, fuming, my immediate thought being that I’d broken my arm. Meaning the end of my World Cup. Off to the rooms. 

What I didn’t realise, but what got back to me later, was that our quicks were following a directive from JL. The written press get up close when watching our net sessions, and our coach had said in their direction something to the effect of ‘If you think he has a problem with the short ball, watch this!’ Then told our guys to bump the shit out of me. 

Stepping back with five years of space, I can see what he was trying to do. Media chat was doing the rounds, so he could have seen this as my chance to prove it wrong and steer the conversation another way. But at what risk, and potential cost? Added to that was JL’s own quote to the media that same day, saying I needed to ‘work really hard’ against short bowling. It probably wasn’t meant to, but it suggested this involved me remedying a problem rather than doing the work that any player does. That made it a very poor read of the room and on how I was travelling. 

4/ This knock on Maxwell, that he is troubled by the short ball, is unavoidably shorthand for ‘the bloke’s got no ticker’.  And Maxwell confesses that he felt the sting of that slight, as he and Marsh were conveyed to the hospital for their X-rays:

It was in that car that I came to the realisation that I wanted my arm to be broken. If I wasn’t delivering, and the perception was that I was a drag on the team, then fuck it – I may as well be out of there. At least it would be over. I couldn’t put it into words, and certainly couldn’t voice this thought to a single soul, but it was my true feeling. Within a few months I would be able to figure out that something deceptive was happening inside my head, but right then I believed it. I was lost and I was desperate. 

The scan came back with a green light for me – bruise, not break. I was lucky, the doctor said, little knowing that it was the opposite of what I wanted to hear. So all I could feel was guilt that SOS was getting the opposite news. His arm was broken, his World Cup was done, and as it turned out he never played for Australia again. I consoled the big guy. He was devastated. I was cooked.

Five years is a long time, and I can’t help but feel that such a scenario would not play now.  It would smack, from a human resources perspective, of workplace bullying.  Perhaps we are too prim. But the gratitude that Maxwell feels for the leadership of Pat Cummins is palpable, in the book and in our podcast.

5/ The passages about Maxwell’s next cricket, in a white ball series against Sri Lanka, are among the most gruelling in the book:

We were greeted with a team meeting. At the Playford Hotel where we were staying, team psychologist Michael Lloyd addressed the group. The message was clear: we were to treat these six games with professionalism and win them all. But the way this was depicted hit me. To do this, everyone would need to give ‘100 per cent commitment, 100 per cent focus, 100 per cent energy.’ There was nothing wrong with the sentiment. But I was hearing this and thinking, ‘Bloody hell, I might have 60 per cent tops.’ 

It was more than that, too. I was petrified by the idea of someone wanting 100 per cent from me. Something about the finality of that number made me realise this had reached a point of no return. I was shocked by how I was responding; it felt like a panic attack. As soon as the meeting ended, I went to Lloydy and completely broke down. We had a great relationship going back to the Academy days and I knew he would respect honesty. It all came out: how sick I felt, how scared, what my mind was doing to me. 

Liberated to a ludicrous extent, I never missed the middle of the bat across 28 balls, creaming 62 to get us up to 233. When it was our turn to field, Fox wanted to mic me up, and as usual I’ll do what I’m told. It included a passage where I was able to basically commentate a run out from the boundary as I was executing it – that’s good telly. There were lines in reports to the effect that ‘Maxi is back!’ Little did they know. All I had done that afternoon was pop my mask on, be it batting or commentating. I would learn a lot about this in the weeks to come – how for so long I had been doing a version of this, trying to do what I thought everybody wanted. 

A version of this assumption drove so much of what was wrong. When I was making runs, I was a good boy. Low scores meant the opposite. Who I was as a person had given way to how well I batted, to the extent that I didn’t know who I was. But using this façade to appear okay had turned into me being a cardboard cut-out of the guy who was there before. I knew it was a risk walking away from the team, but it would only get worse if I stayed. 

Maxwell was on hiatus til September 2020, but four years on exudes a pleasure and contentment with cricket and life that come through strongly in the book’s later chapters. An ambivalent relationship with fame remains - it’s ironic that an autobiography confessing a deep dislike of his epithet ‘The Big Show’ should nonetheless settle for being entitled The Showman. But I heartily commend the book, and who knows what summer may hold for Maxwell?