Australia batting star Glenn Maxwell has revealed how a freak accident when he was attending a 50th birthday party resulted in him breaking his leg which has pushed him onto the sidelines for a significant period and likely endangered his chances of making the cut for the India tour next year as well.
Maxwell recalled the gruesome details of how a friend fell on his leg which required surgery on his fractured fibula. The incident occurred in the backyard of a friend’s place.
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“One of my mates, who was also one of my schoolteachers, we were laughing about something and I pretended to chase him off somewhere,” Maxwell said on Cricket Australia’s Unplayable Podcast.
“I reckon we both took about three or four steps out there, and both slipped at the same time. I just got my foot stuck a little bit, and he fell, unfortunately at a really bad angle and landed straight on my leg. It just snapped. I heard and felt every part of it. It was pretty painful. I was screaming a bit and he was like, ‘please tell me you’re joking, please tell me you’re joking’,” he added.
Maxwell had to wait nearly an hour in pain as he lay on the ground with his friends sheltering him from the rain before being taken to the hospital.
“I probably didn’t sleep for two days while I was in agony,” Maxwell said. “It was a pretty horrible couple of days. My wife was unbelievable through it all.
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“I shattered my fibula. So that one I think was the first snap I heard. It was snapped in half, but it also shattered through the bone. There was a bit of a chip off the tibia as well [and] I ruptured all the ligaments on top of my foot as well…the syndesmosis ligaments, they’re all ruptured. I did a good job of it for such an innocuous thing.
“This is the frustrating thing about it all – I’ve done some dumb things on the field, some dumb things off the field, and I’ve never even come close to injuring myself.
“To do something so innocuously, it’s just frustrating. It was just a nothing incident. The amount of times that I’ve jumped into a pool and gone, ‘that was probably a bit more shallow than I thought’, and not had even a scratch, not even a bruise or anything, not even a rolled ankle.
“It was just a little bit slippery, and all of a sudden there goes a couple of months.”
“There’s a time limit on when they’re going to announce that squad to India and to be fair, there’s a high chance that I won’t make it,” the 34-year-old said.
Before breaking his leg, Maxwell was quite hopeful of staking a claim for a Test recall but the incident has left him in the lurch although he hasn’t lost hope.
“They’re obviously going have to see me playing cricket and they’re obviously going to have to take a big risk if they do take me,” Maxwell said.
He continued, “But I think that’s probably why I don’t want to sort of set any dates or timelines of when I can get back. I would dearly love to be okay for that but I’m a slave to how my body recovers and how quickly I can I suppose get the strength back into it and then get back playing cricket again.”
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