Injured Australian cricket star Glenn Maxwell has revealed some of the gruesome details from a freak accident that saw him break his leg at a backyard birthday party.
Speaking with cricket.com.au’s Unplayable Podcast, Maxwell revealed he waited for nearly an hour in the rain after hearing his leg snap under the weight of a friend at a 50th birthday party, which has ruled him out for an extended period.
“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.
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“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’.”
Maxwell revealed the pain from shattering his left fibula was made more difficult to process due to the fact the incident was so innocuous and could rob him of a return to the Test arena.
“I probably didn’t sleep for two days while I was in agony,” Maxwell said.
“It was it was a pretty horrible couple of days. My wife was unbelievable through it all.
“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 (like this).
“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.”
In a cruel twist Maxwell was on track to earn a Test recall and hoped to add to his seven matches for his country in the longest format on the tour of India in February and March of 2023.
“Out of all the cricket I was going to miss, these were the two games that probably hurt the most,” Maxwell said of Victoria’s home matches against Tasmania this week and NSW next week, which could have catapulted him back into the Test frame.
“I was so excited. Even the couple of sessions that I had with (Victoria assistant coach) Ben Rohrer and the Vics in the couple of days after the last World Cup game – I was working on different things again, much the same as Steve Smith was working on different things behind the scenes.
“It was just exciting again. I feel like I’m always improving when I’m playing this format, I feel like there’s always a space where my technique can get better. It just feels like I make the biggest strides when I’m working on my red-ball game.
“Even Ben Rohrer – I spent I reckon 10 minutes with him and he picked up on things that I was working on in the pre-season that I might have gone away from a little bit just because I was working on a lot of T20 power hitting.
“For him to pull me back into that technical mindset straightaway, it was a lot of fun.
“That’s why missing these two games (hurts). I think these two games are going to be the hardest to watch, knowing they would have been a great opportunity to play red-ball cricket again.”
