Follow Us“Yes it's a big bad show tonight.. dawg - (ohhh)
Yeah it's the big show
Come on - crank it up and turn on all the lights.. y'all -
(ohhh)”
There couldn’t have been better intro music in World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) history. Chances are that you would have already hummed this tune in your head. That’s how iconic the song has been in the wrestling folklore.
By now, there is a vivid image of The Big Show in front of you, but the WWE is fake. There is a solid chance that you would have realised that your entire childhood, too, was a lie.
But none of what the 35-year-old Glenn Maxwell did against the Netherlands was a lie.
It was all real; it would have been painful to be on the receiving end and orgasmic to be on the same team. There aren’t better sights in world cricket than watching the ball fly all over, especially in a day and age where attritional cricket has been kidnapped to the backseat.
The Delhi crowd weren’t in for attritional cricket either.
Thus far, the pitches at the Arun Jaitley stadium couldn’t have had more runs to them than in the ongoing ODI World Cup. When they saw David Warner jump in joy, bringing up his sixth ODI World Cup century, it was already paisa vasool for them.
How can you top an innings where one is so close to World Cup greatness?
Enter Glenn James Maxwell.
*****
Big Show vs Rey Mysterio.
It is a sight that is well-known for WWE fanatics. It was that night when Big Show demolished Rey Mysterio.
Maxwell, aka the Big Show demolishing the Netherlands (Rey Mysterio), wasn’t any different.
At 266/4, the Netherlands side were making a small comeback, like how Mysterio did at the start of the aforementioned sequence. But by the end of it, he was demolished to the core, falling right into the arms of Big Show.
As a neutral, it is at this point when you start feeling bad for the opposition - Scott Edwards’ Dutch side. The scoring rate has become free-flowing, and with every other ball, Maxwell was toying with the field setup.
45.2 overs, 314/6, the all-rounder was just getting started. He was on 35 off 21. Till then, he had only shown glimpses of the damage he could inflict on the Oranje.
Paul van Meekeren’s intentions were clear; he wanted to target the stumps. But it wasn’t just his intentions that were clear; there was a certain Maxwell who knew what he wanted to do, and that was wow the crowd.
Maxwell’s left knee went beyond the leg stump, his right knee was far away from the off-stump. You could see all three stumps, but despite that, stumps were the last thing you bothered about. Maxwell generated enough power to reverse scoop the ball over the third-man region for a four.
That was the exact moment you knew that **** was about to get bad.
48 off 26, enough of that ridiculousness, Maxi, get on the horse and get riding.
Bas de Leede runs in. If you were wondering, he isn’t as quick as van Meekeren but has this skiddy nature about his bowling.
Maxwell, the right-hander is lining up, but it is Maxwell, the southpaw who is punching the Dutch hard. It is a full ball and a delivery that is quite tough to line up in Maxwell-fashion. Except it wasn’t. The right-hander got into the spot-on position before a crunching sound came off the bat.
Even before the ball landed in the crowd, former Australian opener Shane Watson in the background goes, “Oh that’s ridiculous”. Maxwell was himself taken aback by the timing of that shot, and then there was Pat Cummins, who was laughing.
Perhaps knowing that if he was on the receiving end, he would have cried hard into the night.
These shots were the least ridiculous things that the Big Show did on the night.
****
“Worst bat he has ever used,” David Warner recalled Maxwell’s comments in the post-match presentation.
Maxwell had walked out to bat in the 40th over of the clash. He had faced his first delivery in the 41st over of the encounter. By the time he faced his second delivery, the ball raced away to the boundary; his intentions were clear.
By the start of the 47th over, he got to his 23rd ODI half-century. Just a few nights ago, his World Cup scores read: 15, 3, 31* and 0. That duck came against Pakistan in Bangalore, his adopted home ground, when he walked out to bat with the score reading 259/1.
There couldn’t have been a better launch pad, but as it turned out, the crowd were disappointed within minutes. That was followed with scathing comments of “He doesn’t care about Australia, he is careless, and not carefree”.
What Maxwell did over the next ten overs was absolute carnage, or in other words, a World Cup heritage.
But he did it in his own style, picking up from where he left with another audacious shot - a reverse off a short-ball - things only Maxwell could do with such grace. Such was the all-rounder’s brilliance that the ball was sprayed all over the park - mostly behind the wicket - and mostly only through sheer audacity.
When on 95, de Leede couldn’t have gifted a better delivery than he did to Maxwell.
It was served on a platter, a full toss. De Leede went fuller, and the ball went longer. Immediately, the all-rounder broke into a celebration, basking in glory (and sweat). His bat was lying on the ground, and his arms were apart in celebration.
For someone who doesn’t care about the country, he was doing alright.
Adam Zampa broke into a celebration in the dressing room; Warner could just stand up and applaud. And then the camera panned out to the 35-year-old, who now was holding his bat shaped like he was holding a child. Maxwell was just being Maxwell, a man who always comes out to bat at the death like a possessed human.
Post the 2019 ODI World Cup, Maxwell has the second-best strike-rate for any middle-order (4-7) batter at 198.9, and scored 79.2% of his runs on the night through boundaries. In fact, his 106 off 44 was the fifth-most runs scored in the last ten overs of an ODI innings, only behind Rohit Sharma and AB de Villiers, who share the top four spots in between them.
En route to his century, he pummeled sixes for fun, hitting the joint-most sixes for any Australian in ODI World Cup history (31). If that wasn’t enough, he brought up his century off just 40 balls, the fastest for any batter in World Cup history.
40 balls. Let that sink in.
Glenn Maxwell has just three ODI centuries, two of which have come in the ODI World Cup, with both of them at a strike-rate of 190 or above. If that isn’t shocking, Maxwell in T20Is has three centuries.
“We live for those World Cups, every four years, we really have to shine in those,” Warner’s comments couldn’t have been more fitting after Maxwell’s brilliance.