Speaking to Cricket Australia’s Unplayable Podcast from his home as he recovered from surgery on his fractured fibula, Maxwell explained how the incident had unfolded on wet synthetic grass in the backyard of a friend’s place.
“One of my mates, who was also one of my schoolteachers, we were laughing about something and I pretended to chase him off somewhere,” Maxwell said.
“I reckon we both took about three or four steps out there, and both slipped at the same time. I just got my foot stuck a little bit, and he fell, unfortunately at a really bad angle and landed straight on my leg.
“It just snapped. I heard and felt every part of it. It was pretty painful. I was screaming a bit and he was like, ‘please tell me you’re joking, please tell me you’re joking’.”
Maxwell lay on the ground for 50 minutes in agony as friends had to shelter him from the rain in the outdoor area before eventually driving him to hospital.
There’s a time limit on when they’re going to announce that squad to India and to be fair, there’s a high chance that I won’t make it. They’re obviously going have to see me playing cricket and they’re obviously going to have to take a big risk if they do take me.
“I probably didn’t sleep for two days while I was in agony,” Maxwell said. “It was a pretty horrible couple of days. My wife was unbelievable through it all.
“I shattered my fibula. So that one I think was the first snap I heard. It was snapped in half, but it also shattered through the bone.
“There was a bit of a chip off the tibia as well [and] I ruptured all the ligaments on top of my foot as well…the syndesmosis ligaments, they’re all ruptured. I did a good job of it for such an innocuous thing.
“This is the frustrating thing about it all – I’ve done some dumb things on the field, some dumb things off the field, and I’ve never even come close to injuring myself.
“To do something so innocuously, it’s just frustrating. It was just a nothing incident. The amount of times that I’ve jumped into a pool and gone, ‘that was probably a bit more shallow than I thought’, and not had even a scratch, not even a bruise or anything, not even a rolled ankle.
“It was just a little bit slippery, and all of a sudden there goes a couple of months.”
Maxwell was especially frustrated to miss Victoria’s next two Sheffield Shield matches against Tasmania and New South Wales as they were set to be his first red-ball fixtures since 2019 after he had gone agonisingly close to a surprising Test recall in Sri Lanka earlier this year. Maxwell had been working on his red-ball batting with Victoria batting coach Ben Rohrer in the days after Australia’s T20 World Cup exit, prior to him breaking his leg.
He was hopeful of pushing his case for a Test recall on the four-Test tour of India next year, but now realises that dream is fading.
“There’s a time limit on when they’re going to announce that squad to India and to be fair, there’s a high chance that I won’t make it,” Maxwell said.
“They’re obviously going have to see me playing cricket and they’re obviously going to have to take a big risk if they do take me.
“But I think that’s probably why I don’t want to sort of set any dates or timelines of when I can get back. I would dearly love to be okay for that but I’m a slave to how my body recovers and how quickly I can I suppose get the strength back into it and then get back playing cricket again.”