Irreplaceable Glenn Maxwell Retires As A Truly 'One-Of-A-Kind' Cricketer

It’s well and truly the end of an era for Australia in ODI cricket, as after David Warner and Steve Smith, Glenn Maxwell has now called it quits from 50-over cricket.

All three aforementioned players are first-ballot Hall of Famers without a question, but it will by no means be an overstatement to claim that Maxwell will be the hardest to replace. 

At the youth level and in domestic cricket, you can find and groom openers who are run machines. Equally, you can get in folks who turn out to be an absolute rock batting in the middle-order. 

But how the hell do you find anyone remotely capable of doing what Maxwell did? How do you even go about replacing him?

Here you have a one-of-a-kind freak with the bat who is statistically the most destructive batter the format has ever seen. And oh, he is not your typical top-order dasher; he bats in the lower middle-order and changes the course of games from there for fun. 

But not just that, on top of this, you have a ridiculously effective off-spinner good enough to bowl his country to two 50-over ODI World Cup titles, where he was the sole spinner in the XI in one of the title wins. 

And well, hold up, this same man is also among the greatest fielders in cricket history; someone who possesses athleticism and a rocket arm bettered by few in the sport’s history. All this in one. 

It’s not even a joke; Australia might have to pick two, if not three, different players to replace Maxwell. And it’s only when they start to assemble their first ‘post-Maxwell’ ODI XI, the Kangaroos will realise what they’ll be missing. 

Maxwell has always been one of those cricketers whose impact extends beyond numbers. In a way, numbers don’t do justice to what he truly brought to the table. 

I mean, take his bowling for instance. Overall in his ODI career, Maxwell has taken 77 wickets at an average of 47.32 and an economy of 5.46.  Extremely middling numbers, definitely not something you’d associate with ‘top’ all-rounder. 

Yet he’s been at the heart of two World Cup wins. 

At the 2015 ODI World Cup, a 26-year-old Maxwell was trusted by Australia as the lone spinner so that they could play all three of Mitchell Johnson, Mitchell Starc and Josh Hazlewood aside from James Faulkner. 

Maxwell responded with 38 overs, an economy of 5.7 and 6 wickets, with one of those wickets arguably being the single-biggest wicket of the tournament — that of Martin Guptill, the highest run-getter in the tournament, in the final. 

And oh, he was also the third-highest run-getter for Australia in the 2015 WC, with 324 runs at an average of 64.80 and a strike rate of 182.00.

Cut to 2023, Australia trusted Maxwell as their second spinner in the sub-continent when he was coming on the back of a lengthy injury layoff. And this was quite the unpopular call as pretty much everyone wanted the Aussies to have Ashton Agar as the second spinner in the XI, with Maxwell being the part-timer who contributes with occasional overs.

As it turned out, Australia lifted the title on November 19, 2023, and Maxwell the bowler ended up with an economy of 4.8 — the joint-best among all Aussie bowlers — and 6 wickets; and again, one of those wickets being *the* breakthrough that flipped the script of the final, that of Indian skipper Rohit Sharma. 

68.3 overs was what Maxwell sent down in the 2023 World Cup, and he ‘complemented’ that with 400 runs at 66/150, including scoring the fastest hundred in World Cup history and playing the greatest innings in the format’s history against Afghanistan at the Wankhede, where he became the first Australian and the first non-opener ever to smash a double-ton in the format. 

This is what people tend to overlook when they discuss Maxwell, particularly in ODIs. 

Sure, he was a very frustrating batter to watch at times. And sure, he made a lot of terrible decisions when he had the bat in his hand. But Maxwell was more than just a middle-order powerhouse; he was a genuine all-rounder — and a three-dimensional one at that — who impacted games consistently. 

He was so versatile and so good that, for over an entire decade, he ended up giving Australia balance that other sides could only dream of. And that very balance helped the Aussies win the World Cup not once but twice. 

Australia, then, will unquestionably miss Maxwell’s all-round brilliance, but his retirement is also a bummer for the common fan, for he was the kind of cricketer who put bums to seats and brought the entire world to a standstill when he had the bat in his hand. He put the ‘box’ in box office and rightfully earned the reputation of being the most entertaining batter in world cricket. 

Glenn Maxwell has retired from ODIs, and well, watching an Australia match might never be as entertaining as it once was.