Guilty Laughter
I still don’t know quite how to process what Glenn Maxwell did last night.
I’m sure someone, somewhere will write a comprehensive ball-by-ball account of Maxwell’s 202-run eighth-wicket partnership with Pat Cummins that crowned an astonishing comeback against Afghanistan in Mumbai. I’ve already seen a fair few discussions furiously exerting themselves to make room for Maxwell’s unbeaten double hundred from №6 in pursuit of 292 in a World Cup match in the pantheon of the greatest individual performances in cricket history. Perhaps someone might even write Afghanistan’s side of this story, and call it The Night We Faced Maxwell, or something. All of those would be worthy contributions to cricketing lore.
I doubt, though, that the sheer insensibility of what happened last night will ever truly be reduced to words.
In gathering my thoughts together to lay them out now, I find myself a victim of this very insensibility.
Even though it has only been a few hours since it happened, I can hardly summon any discrete sequences of play from the Australian batting innings from memory. I can find nothing specific to correspond to the rising sense that I was watching a miraculous individual performance. I certainly don’t remember when Australia first started sniffing that the target of 292 — which felt thoroughly beyond them when Cummins joined Maxwell at 7/91 — might not yet be out of their reach. A couple of exceptions aside, if you show me a boundary Maxwell hit from a random point in that innings, I will not be able to tell you what the score was when he hit it.
What I can tell you, though, is that Mujeeb-ur-Rahman dropped a catch off a Maxwell paddle scoop at short fine-leg early in his innings. When it happened, I felt like I was being dragged back to watch on when I didn’t want to; conflicted because I was ready for the match to be over even as I couldn’t bear to leave it behind with Maxwell still not out at one end. (Maxwell, with complete honesty, said afterwards that he wished this innings was chanceless but knows that it was not.)
I remember the pinging sound off Cummins’ bat as he sent the first ball of medium-pace he faced, after having suffered through some fifteen consecutive overs of spin, skating down to deep point for an easy single. This was probably the first time it registered with me that there were two Australian batters on the field. (Cummins has since admitted they were anxiously counting down the overs of spin Afghanistan had left to bowl.)
I know my mouth was about on the floor when Maxwell reverse-swatted a six over deep third to bring the target under forty runs. (Cummins said last night — with more confidence than judgment, I think — that he felt as though he and the other two batters could win it if Maxwell brought them to within forty of the target.)
And I doubt I will ever efface from my mind the image of everyone around me at the time just staring at the screen aghast after Maxwell had pummeled the last ball of the innings for six to pull off the impossible. (Robert Cianflone captured this image of him moments after the win and the illusion that he is standing on one leg — having watched him soldier on one-legged for so long — is utterly spellbinding.)
It is still early to say this, but I reckon what elevates Maxwell 201* is that it is two things at once.
It is, in the first place, a realization, in full, of the batting talent that we know he has always possessed. I’ve long maintained that he’s the best in the world at doing exactly what he did against Afghanistan: aggressively stepping into good bowling, seizing the initiative, and compelling the good bowling to turn rotten.
As his career has followed the same stilted path that has shouted down so many prospects in the past, I’ve come to accept that his peculiar brand of best-in-the-world-ness would be fated to be measured not in terms of the neat lines of consistency or records but in terms of the messier, more confusing meaning that accompanies words like ‘capability’ and ‘potential’. This might sound like a convenient thing to say now but I can only emphasize that I’ve believed it sincerely throughout: this kind of performance has been within Glenn Maxwell from the very start.
This is, in fact, part why he’s so maddeningly frustrating to watch at times. I’ve often wished he played for himself a bit more because I want — for myself, if not for him — a body of work that everyone can point to ten, fifteen, twenty years from now and say ‘look, this is how good he was.’ For what it’s worth, I think Maxwell fans are probably losing that ‘body of work’ battle in the long run. But his innings last night was so remarkable and so complete an affirmation of his approach to the sport that it goes, no questions asked, close to the top of whatever measure people want to use to assess exceptional individual performances. His arrival into this conversation brings with it the powerful sense that he should’ve been here all along.
At a minimum, for anyone in the future who wants to know just how good he was, we now have a clear totem.
Go back and watch that night he made 201*.
The other reason I suspect November 7, 2023 will endure in Glenn Maxwell’s legacy is that it was — undoubtedly in the moment but even more strikingly in hindsight — an astonishing personification of explosive batting skill as we know it.
Maxwell’s shotmaking has always carried a signature of originality: in how effortlessly he gets his legs out of the way when hitting powerfully into the outfield, in his backlift and shuffle-step that are designed to demand a confrontation between bat and ball, in how he takes his head completely off the centre-line when launching sixes over the leg-side, even in the sharp-angle slices high into the sky that so often claim his wicket.
Yet here, as fatigue steadily ate up his mobility and the prospect of victory turned from illusory to urgent, the prospect of Maxwell running into a wall seemed imminent. However, somewhere along the way, it seemed as though he began to fold the best traits of limited-overs batting into himself and give them expression. Left to himself, Maxwell — just Maxwell — might well have fallen short. But, as the score happily clicked past milestones that had seemed out of reach just minutes prior, he appeared to summon Viv Richards and Adam Gilchrist and Virender Sehwag and AB de Villiers and Ben Stokes, borrowing, for one night only, the best traits of each. It felt like an impromptu congregation of past and present, channelled out into the world through the body and mind of a man who — suddenly, shockingly, thrillingly — represented not just the very best explosive batting skill to have visited the sport but also the courage needed to put it into motion.
There is something to be said for that last bit.
Without the courage that comes so naturally to Maxwell — a courage which came across as outright superhuman across this innings — Australia’s heist would never have materialized. This, I think, is what those who didn’t watch it as it happened will find it hardest to fully grasp after the fact: Maxwell danced on a precipice all night, knowing throughout that his dismissal would functionally end the match as a contest. When he could dance no longer, he hopped on one leg.
And when he found it tough even to hop, he just stood still and, with just his arms and his will, pulled a match out of the fire in which his batting partner contributed twelve runs off sixty-eight balls.
Two weeks ago in Delhi, Maxwell had walked in in the forty-first over and hit the fastest hundred in the history of this tournament. That, however, had seen Maxwell get a running start and put the match out of the opposition’s sight.
Here, he entered at 4/49, watched teammates get themselves out around him, nearly got out himself on three separate occasions, and nearly retired on three more. Through a double hundred in which he hit twenty-one boundaries and ten sixes, he reserved his loudest moments of self-congratulation for when he hobbled across to complete single runs. Not because they were hard to find, but because he managed to complete them at all.
Australia’s last twenty-two runs took Maxwell four balls to manifest: six, six, four, and six. With each hit to the fence, his teammates up in the dressing room started to laugh, clap, look at each other, and then laugh some more.
They knew what I knew, what everybody knew.
Maxwell had no business winning this match. But he was going to win it anyway.
The sight of that half-celebratory, fully incredulous laughter of Maxwell’s teammates might, in time, come to be the thing I recall most vividly about last night. It was the laughter of ten players grateful to one player for winning a match for all eleven.
It was guilty laughter, the sweetest laughter of all.
