Mumbai left wondering by Maxwell, Lynn joins the IPL party

While Glenn Maxwell has set the Indian Premier League 2014 alight with his clean and sometimes mind-boggling batting in the tournament, there are others who have chipped in with useful efforts of their own in the first 10 days of the competition.

First things first and the Mumbai Indians could well be seriously re-analysing their team selections – and non-selections.

They refused to retain Maxwell, and let go of enough number of other players who have almost all shown what they can do with opportunities.

Clearly Mumbai forgot the IPL’s main mantra – where talent meets opportunity – and failed to either retain or select those few before and during the auction.

Maxwell happens to be one of them.

For an all-rounder bought for a million dollars last year, he featured in only three matches the whole of that season. Look at his international form around that time and that cost seemed highly unjustified.

Last year, before he had played in the IPL, Maxwell had featured in a couple of Tests and scored nothing. Up to that point, he had made just 201 runs in the ODI arena at around 25, while having never reached double figures in T20Is.

However, it looked like someone at the Mumbai Indians had an astute sense of what was to follow. Unfortunately for them, they did not trust themselves enough.

It was after the IPL that Maxwell’s international career seemed to have taken off.

Mind you, the key words here are ‘taken off’. It appears for the first time that he is living up to the nickname he was previously criticised for, ‘The Big Show’.

In the 13 ODIs he’s played since the end of the previous IPL season, Maxwell has averaged 42. That included four half-centuries. It was a precursor of what was to follow, both at the international level and domestically, but Mumbai refused to broaden their selection horizons.

The auction came and went and Maxwell wasn’t drafted in by Mumbai. Instead, the Kings XI Punjab upped the bidding ante and shelled out another million to bring him in.

Then the 2014 World T20 happened. Watching him bat with the freedom he exuded there would have gladdened the hearts of all cricket fans except the Mumbai Indians.

Guided by the encouraging influence of coach Darren Lehmann, Maxwell was one of the shining lights for Australia in an otherwise forgettable campaign.

His knocks of 74 and 45 against Pakistan and West Indies respectively provided the world an insight to the sheer brazenness, even bordering on arrogance, of Maxwell’s batting.

And it’s a quality that batsmen can not only get away with but is also needed at times in this format.

Most enjoyed those knocks, others gasped in shock while there were a few who believed this approach couldn’t always work. But the Mumbai Indians were probably looking to assuage the knots that were developing in their stomach by then.

And now Mumbai’s worst fears have come true.

Even as their own batsmen have struggled in the opening two games of the competition, barely nibbling at scores more than 100, Maxwell has been teeing off to near-centuries of his own. And without batting an eyelid.

Some media reports and many IPL fans have already termed Maxwell the new Chris Gayle of IPL.

Even discounting the exaggerations given it’s still early days in the competition, and the fact that batsmen as unorthodox like Maxwell are bound to fail more often than they succeed, one senses the all-rounder’s job is to win his team four to five games off his own bat this season.

Teams need anywhere between seven to eight wins in the IPL to make it to the playoffs, which will be Punjab’s first target, and if one player can win them four or five games, he would have done more than what’s required from him, irrespective of his cost.

Maxwell’s already won them three.

Virender Sehwag, George Bailey and Mitchell Johnson, all match-winners in their own right, have barely been tested and they can be expected to be attributed at least a victory apiece as well. A playoffs place beckons for the Kings XI, their first since the first IPL season

The defending champions, Mumbai, are still searching for their best combination. I would have given an arm and a leg to have been a fly on the wall when they decided not to retain Maxwell and went for Harbhajan and Rayudu instead.

Over in Kolkata, Chris Lynn was tipped to be one of the batsmen to look out by Greg Chappell before the start of the previous Big Bash League season. Someone at the Kolkata Knight Riders, ostensibly their coach, Trevor Bayliss, may have been listening intently.

It did not come as too much of a surprise that Lynn was bought by one of the teams during the auction despite his lack of experience at the international level. Still, the question was whether he would, like Maxwell did last season, warm the bench for majority of the time.

Kolkata selected the all-rounder Shakib al Hasan for their opening two games, but in a bid to bring more depth to their batting Lynn was afforded a chance in their third match against the Royal Challengers Bangalore. He did not disappoint.

On what looked like a slowish Sharjah pitch, Lynn barely broke a sweat on his way to a 31-ball 45, a knock that also saw him smack six hits to the fence – three of them over it.

But his greatest contribution came late in the match, off the final over of the Bangalore innings when he recovered miraculously from a slip-up at the deep midwicket boundary to take what has been now described as one of the best catches in the history of the Indian Premier League.

So much so that he’s got a new nickname now in the dressing room.

Neo, as in Neo from the Matrix.

I will let this video do the talking.

And now watch this.

Cannot stop watching it not, can you?