Glenn Maxwell and Virender Sehwag had been team-mates during Kings XI Punjab's run to the IPL final in 2014, but a few years later the relationship between the pair soured.
Only dropping three games, we finished top by a healthy margin and earned the double chance, which we ended up needing on losing to Kolkata. We won through to the final in a high-scoring qualifier. Sehwag had also joined Punjab and he smashed 122 from 58. I've never been shy about an unconventional shot first ball, and that's what I went for in the final, but the reverse sweep didn't clear Morne Morkel - a touch unlucky to find the tallest bloke in the game. Setting KKR 200 for victory should have been enough but we went down in the final over. As close to the perfect season as you get in the IPL, but no trophy.
I was player of the tournament with 552 runs - I'd ridden the wave, hit more sixes than anyone, and was told clearly that the franchise was going to be built around me to go one step better. But just as I'm prone to runs of great form, it usually runs the other way as well - when I'm in a rut, it takes some breaking.
Having topped the table in 2014, we collected the wooden spoon two years running. My own numbers, sure enough, went off a cliff. The IPL is such a difficult place to be at times like this, and for me the key has been learning how to avoid inflating cricketing failure into a catastrophe. As a younger player this was more difficult. I doubted myself, felt the negativity, saw the social media posts. I'm proud of never trying to defend my way out of a funk, which is the most selfish thing you can do as a T20 batter, but willing myself to be a match-winner doesn't always make it so.
These experiences combined to make 2017 a huge test for me. By now, I was earning plenty of money each season but that had little to do with my motivation - it was time to demonstrate to the world that 2014 wasn't a fluke, that I could boss the IPL again. The big boost I had on the way back into the Kings XI orbit was that Test century in Ranchi a few weeks before. I felt primed to go big.
This time there was a twist. 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.
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. Winning papers over cracks, and as we got up in the first two games, the confusion behind the scenes was ignored. 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.
When it came to selection, I thought it might be a good idea to bring the coaches into a WhatsApp group to make our decisions. Everyone agreed to this and shared their teams, with the exception of Sehwag. At the end of the process, he made it clear that he would pick the starting XI, end of story. We were losing on and off the field by now, with Sehwag on more than one occasion making decisions that didn't necessarily make sense.
Take poor old Ishant Sharma. At one point he was told not to bother coming to our game that day in Mumbai, having not been picked in a while. We had several other local bowlers, plus the Kiwi quick Matt Henry had just come into the side. Doing the right thing, Ishant did a gym session and came along anyway, bowling at full pace in the warm-up. Then Eoin Morgan was told that he would be a new inclusion that day, taking the last overseas player spot from Matt. Morgs protested that it wasn't fair to drop Matt after only playing one game, so they rejigged again, left out Morgs, and both Henry and Ishant played.
It was hard to figure out how the organisation was allowed to be run so erratically.
The season came down to our final group game against Pune away from home, and we had a shocker batting first on a wet wicket, rolled for 73. It was all over. In the context of what was going on, I'm still quite proud of how we were able to broadly keep the show on the road until that stage. I was also happy with how I performed, doing the right thing as leader by giving myself the chance to influence games at the right time with bat and ball. Of course, we were all flat not to make the post-season, but it could have been so much worse.
I volunteered to do press that night, but Sehwag said he would instead. 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.
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 only lasted one more season.
Entering my thirties, I'd experienced the best and worst of what the IPL had to offer. A fallow season in 2018 back at Delhi was frustrating, as I wanted to make it work for Punter [Ricky Ponting], who by now was my coach. There was so much else going on that year, which I'll detail in a later chapter, that maybe I was destined to miss out.
As for the pandemic season that was postponed until late 2020, I found myself back at Kings XI in the post-Sehwag era. But I couldn't take a trick. Not for lack of trying, I didn't clear the rope in the whole tournament, something that became an internet joke, building game by game. Returning home for a one-dayer against India straight after the tournament, nine balls into my knock, there was that sweet feeling of a switch hit coming out of the middle for six. I added two more in a minute. When I turned around, I remembered that my Kings captain KL Rahul was behind the stumps for India. The look on his face could best be described as "What the f***?" All I could do was shrug and say sorry. At some point you need to surrender to the reality of what you are. This is me.
But I still felt there had to be a twist in this story, and there was. Who to thank? Virat Kohli. On that same tour of Australia, he wanted to whisper an idea to me: him, me and AB de Villiers to be the middle order at Royal Challengers Bangalore in 2021. I was in love with this before he finished his sentence. Having started with Sachin and Ricky, the chance to bat with the equivalent of them in my own generation, in those gold pads no less, was irresistible.
Before then, auctions had come and gone. This time, though, I was obsessed. When the paddle came down for me from RCB, I was the happiest cricketer in the world. It was in Bangalore where I would begin my second act as a player. And it is what I learned in Bangalore colours that would allow me to play the most important cricket of my life.
This is an excerpt from The Showman by Glenn Maxwell, published by Simon and Schuster, available in bookstores and online retailers on October 30