Punjab Kings have been dealt a serious blow as star Australian all-rounder Glenn Maxwell is likely to miss the remainder of the Indian Premier League after fracturing his finger during a training session. The injury occurred just ahead of the rain-hit match against Kolkata Knight Riders, in which Maxwell managed only 7 runs—continuing his underwhelming form this season.
Maxwell did not feature in Punjab’s latest match against Chennai Super Kings, where he was replaced by Suryansh Shedge. PBKS went on to win the game by four wickets.
“Unfortunately, Maxi’s broken his finger. He broke it just before the last game at training. He didn’t think it was too bad, but it ended up getting pretty bad. He had scans and yeah, the results weren’t great. So unfortunately for Maxi, I think it’s likely he’s out for the tournament,” said teammate Marcus Stoinis in a conversation with ‘Jiostar’.
Punjab’s head coach Ricky Ponting acknowledged the setback and shared that the team is in the process of assessing options for a replacement, though it won’t be easy.
“We will be signing some replacements at some stage,” Ponting said during the post-match press conference.
“We’ve got until our 12th game, so we have a couple of games to go yet. With the squad we’ve got, we’re trying to find players in our squad anyway. So we’ve got Azmatullah (Omarzai), Aaron Hardie who hasn’t played yet, Xavier Bartlett who didn’t play today.
It’s conditions based. But when we get to Dharamsala he will come back into the reckoning up there, where the ball might swing and bounce a little bit more,” he added.
Ponting noted that limited international availability has made the search more challenging, prompting the franchise to closely evaluate its pool of domestic talent.
“…there’s not a lot of high quality replacements out there to be honest. So we’ve just been patient,” he said.
“We’re having a look around at Indian talent as well and we’re looking at what roles we might be able to fill with some younger Indian players. We’ll actually take a couple of guys to Dharamsala with us, a couple of guys trained with us yesterday and they will come with us to Dharamsala.
…we’ll have a closer look at them and they might find themselves with a Punjab contract going forward (smiles). It has to be this week, has to be before the 12th game so stay tuned,” Ponting concluded.
Punjab Kings will now have to rethink their strategy as they push forward in the tournament without one of their key overseas players.
