Australia’s batting all-rounder Glenn Maxwell has revealed his fallout with Virender Sehwag while leading Kings XI Punjab (now Punjab Kings) in the Indian Premier League (IPL) way back in the 2017 season. In his book ‘The Showman’, he alleged that Sehwag pulled the strings as the franchise’s Director of Cricket Operations and he also decided the playing XI. However, Maxwell had a stunning season for the Punjab franchise in IPL 2014, smashing 552 runs at a strike rate of 187.75 as the team finished runners-up that year.

“I was going to be captain, which Sehwag told me when we met during the Test series. We had played together, but now he had retired into what was described at the time as a “mentor” role. We discussed how the team would operate and I thought we were all on the same page,” Maxwell wrote in his book.

“How wrong I was. Our coach, J Arunkumar, was coming in for his first season, and it became clear to him that he was coach in name only, with Sehwag pulling the strings… Privately, though, I had coaches and players coming to me asking what on earth was going on, and I found it difficult to give them a straight answer,” he again shared.

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Glenn Maxwell also recalled that after the team was all-out for 73 in their last league match, he was about to attend the press conference. However, Sehwag decided that he would go and put the blame on the captain for not taking responsibility as leader of the pack as well.

“Upon getting onto the team bus, I found I’d been deleted from the main WhatsApp group. What was going on here? By the time we reached the hotel my phone was blowing up, with Sehwag having unloaded on me as a “big disappointment”, blaming me for not taking responsibility as captain, and all the rest. It was unpleasant, especially when I thought we had parted on good terms,” he wrote.

“I texted him to say how much it hurt to read those comments and added that he had lost a fan in me for the way he had conducted himself. Sehwag’s response was simple: “Don’t need fan like you.” We never spoke again. I knew my time was at an end and told the owners as much: if Sehwag was going to stick around, they were making a mistake and not to bother with me,” he concluded.