.png)
12 hours ago
4
When I close my eyes at night, Mitchell Starc is at the top of his run. It might be punishment for forgetting to vote for him in the Guardian’s all-time Ashes players list.
His 6ft 6in frame elongates and stretches until he’s uncomfortably filling my mind’s eye and then the legs start, a nightmare-beautiful rhythmic run. The arms piston, the eyes steady, the head as still as a marble mantelpiece. He’s a cheetah in giant white wristbands, a moon-marauding wolf, a river of melted chocolate, that expensive, unpalatable, 95% stuff.
Through the noise of the crowd, his feet crunch across the grass, like the president’s shiny shoes on the West Wing floor over the Brothers in Arms soundtrack to Two Cathedrals. And then the delivery: one huge stride of a giant right leg and the arm catapulting over, pure momentum, pure balance, pure speed.
If England were counting on the 35-year-old Starc stumbling over the hill in this series, it was an assumption too many. Like Jimmy Anderson before him, Starc is ageing like the finest of racehorses – those seven wickets for 58 in the first innings at Perth were his best Test figures. He walked off the field as player of the match, with 10 in the game for the third time in his career, though this time in less than two days.
As Rory Burns could testify, Starc bowls a mean match opener. In 2021 he was famously circling at the top of his mark waiting for the umpires to call play at the Gabba, before toppling Burns with a pitch-perfect inswinger very first ball, to start the series as it meant to go on. Downhill fast.
This time around, England did at least last five balls before Crawley threw himself at a perfect length delivery and Usman Khawaja did the rest at slip, albeit at the second time of asking. When Starc removed Crawley in the second innings, courtesy of that momentum-defying mid-air body swerve and snatch to his left, it was the 21st time he had taken a wicket in his first over of an innings in his Test career. Adam Lyth is the third Englishman to make up the hitlist – watch them all and weep here.
Joe Root, Ben Stokes and Crawley all fell to Starc twice at Perth, for three ducks and a grand total of 16 runs. And Starc’s hold over Stokes grows ever tighter – that brute of a delivery in the second innings, angling in, shimmying away, making it 11 Test dismissals, five of them crashing chords knocking out his stumps.
Kerry O’Keeffe has called Starc “one of the most underrated cricketers Australia have produced,” and when you look at the figures, on top of the aesthetics, it is hard to disagree.
In the first session of the first day, he passed 100 Ashes wickets – squaring up Joe Root, as you asked. Of all the fast bowlers who have 100 wickets against England, Starc, now 35, is the only one who made his debut in the 21st century – against New Zealand at Brisbane in 2011.
He was only the second Australian fast bowler to take 400 wickets, behind Glenn McGrath, and of Australians, only McGrath, Nathan Lyon and Shane Warne lie above him in the Test wicket-taking pantheon. His fellow left-armer Wasim Akram (25) is the only bowler with more five-wicket hauls than Starc’s 17.
He is one half of a disgustingly talented power couple with Australia women’s captain Alyssa Healy. And he’s nice. And he’s modest. And he has things in proportion. “It’s another game,” he sniffed before proceedings began. “I actually said this not long ago to Alyssa, a few months ago I was playing a Test match in the West Indies, I didn’t have a single message. This week I’ve had about 55, so what’s the difference? It’s the same sort of game.”
But he might have been making mischief when he was asked before the Ashes to name his top three wickets. The first was a yorker to Stokes during the 2019 World Cup. The other two involved Brendon McCullum – his first Test wicket in 2011, and an inswinging yorker to kill the World Cup final of 2015.
Brad Haddin summed up Starc well in one of the many post-Perth post-mortems held in the three empty days England kindly cleared in the calendar. “He’s at the top of his game, he stood up at all big moments. It was hugely impressive, with an inexperienced attack. You want to keep the stumps in play, and that’s what he did throughout the whole game. I think he bowled smart, with clear plans, at times he took the ball away from the English batters knowing they’d come nice and hard.”
And all this while holding up the Australian attack, his bowling buddies Pat Cummins and Josh Hazlewood watching from the stands. Now they’ve both been spotted bowling in the nets for Australia. England had their chance at Perth. That sound you can hear, that thudding of new boots on the Brisbane turf, that glimpse of a pink ball under floodlights – it’s the cavalry.
-
This is an extract from the Guardian’s weekly cricket email, The Spin. To subscribe, just visit this page and follow the instructions.
