The IPL 2025 season for Glenn Maxwell has ended due to a shattered finger. Prior to the April 30 match against CSK in Chennai, his captain for the Punjab Kings, Shreyas Iyer, had verified the injury at the toss. Shreyas stated that the team hasn’t considered a successor yet, even though the Australian hadn’t officially filed out at that moment. This was a clear indication that Maxwell had played his final game of the season.
“It’s very unfortunate that he’s got a fractured finger,” Shreyas said at the toss. “To be honest, we haven’t decided about the replacements yet so far but we are pretty strong in our team’s mindset and what we have outside of our playing XI. We’ve got varieties of players who can win you matches. So we’re going to stick to that as much as possible.”
Marcus Stoinis, Maxwell’s Australian teammate, also discussed the injury that ended his countryman’s season. According to Stoinis, Maxwell sustained the injury prior to their most recent match, which was a rain-soaked match versus KKR in which Maxwell batted. In their playing XI for the CSK match, PBKS selected just three foreign players and substituted Suryansh Shedge for Maxwell.
“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,” Stoinis told Jiostar.
After making waves with a daring performance of 552 runs at a strike rate of 187.75 eleven seasons prior, Maxwell did not have a joyous return to the team. He reached comparable peaks for RCB in the 2021 and 2023 seasons, scoring 513 and 400 runs, respectively. However, he has only scored 48 runs in seven appearances for PBKS this year. The team led by Shreyas has won five of their nine games and is vying for a postseason berth, barely outside the top four.
After the game, head coach Ricky Ponting stated that the team is searching for a successor, but it has been difficult to locate one because the season falls during the Pakistan Super League. Despite PBKS now only having six foreign players in their team, Ponting made a suggestion that an Indian player might be eventually signed.
“We will be signing some replacements at some stage,” Ponting said. “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. We have got most basis covered. 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.
“So we’ve actually been a little bit patient. Maxi’s [injury] only been a couple of days, Lockie’s has been two or three weeks. And with the PSL happening at the same time, there’s not a lot of high quality replacements out there to be honest. So we’ve just been patient.
“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.”
