There is something so devilishly simple about Mitchell Starc’s inswinging bazookas with which he dismantled three West Indians in his first over, and two more by his fifteenth delivery, to go past 400 Test wickets in his 100th Test on Monday.
It’s fast, it curves, and it stings either the pad or the stumps. There is no surprise. No batsman can claim to be caught unaware of what he is going to receive from Starc with the new ball, especially if the conditions are going to abet swing. And yet, many end up being utterly embarrassed, watching the pacer’s pockmarked face running past them with a raised arm. 23 batsmen have seen that blurry sight after being dismissed in the first over of a Test match by the Australian.
That inswinging Starc delivery is a landmark of modern-day cricket. It would be tempting for some to try adding Shaheen Afridi’s version to it, but its lack of consistency reduces it to just a footnote, especially in Test match cricket.
He hasn’t quite publicly agreed yet, but in the circle of former Australian players, Starc’s turnaround apparently came after the stinging criticism from Shane Warne in 2014. “He is too soft,” Warne had reportedly claimed, and the criticism seemed to be shared by the then-Australian management as Starc was dropped. Australia’s bowling coach, then, was Craig McDermott, who would term it as “presence”. “It was something we have talked about even before Warnie got stuck into him,” Dermott had said.
Around this time, in a hotel in Dubai, former South African pacer Allan Donald called over Starc for a chat. They were both in Bengaluru’s IPL team – Donald the coach, Starc the young fast bowler from Australia. Donald wanted to know whether Starc had it in him to take the next step as a fast bowler and become a leader.
“I felt he had it, but wanted to hear from him. I asked him, “Are you ready to become a leader?” Donald had once recalled that episode while speaking to The Indian Express.
Leadership, Donald believes, is what separates the ones who can merely bowl quick and the fastmen who go on to become great bowlers. It’s about having control over the art of fast bowling but goes beyond that – “work ethic, hunger, desire to become great, ruthless, ability and keenness to set an example to other bowlers in the team, and be a mongrel of sorts on field …” Donald listed them out with feverish passion.
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Donald remembered Starc looking up at him that day to say, “Yes, I would love to do that”.
But being nice came easier to Starc. There is this video of Glen Maxwell interviewing Virat Kohli where the talk swerves to Starc and Kohli pipes up, “He is such a wonderful human being”, and Maxwell chips in with, “Yeah he is a softie!”
Not often do you hear stories of a childhood romance coming to fruition in adulthood. Starc was 9 when he walked into an academy with dreams of becoming a wicketkeeper. His chief competition in that selection camp was Alyssa Healy, before she moved away from the boys’ camp. Years later, they would marry, to complete an aww-inducing story, worthy of a rom-com.
Natural action
It was one of the coaches in an under-15 camp who saw him bowl medium pace and told him to forget keeping and use his height and natural action to start bowling fast. The first thing one notices is the rhythmic run-up. With some fast bowlers, one tends to notice the odd things – the bobbing head, flailing arms, the lack of fluidity in the run – with things falling in place only at the last instant at the crease, which sets these oddities right. Not with Starc. Everything seems perfectly synced, and the result seems like an obvious culmination of sorts.
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Wasim Akram had once talked about how, after watching Starc bowl for the first time, he got so excited that he had a half-hour chat with the Australian, leaving behind one advice in particular: Snap the wrist at release to get more swing. That wrist-snap injected an extra dose of venom into Starc’s art.
It was to Akram that Donald himself would return when he became Australia’s bowling consultant for a brief while. By this time, post the days of the Dubai chat, if anything, the softie had turned cold-blooded. So much so that he had started to throw the balls back at the batsmen and Steve Smith had to once pull him up publicly for his behaviour. Even McDermott wanted his man to hold back a bit. “I have seen him go the other way now – sometimes he can go a little bit too far. You don’t want to get too over-aggressive because you forget what you are trying to do with the ball and what you are trying to do with the batsmen.”
During one of his initial chats, Donald, who was talking about the angles of release and how late the ball should start moving in the air to create havoc, realised it was better to tell Starc to observe the master instead. “I told him, if there is one bowler you want to watch and learn about all these things, it is Wasim Akram. What a bowler he was – he had everything and more.” Inspired by Akram’s videos, and close monitoring from Donald, the ball began to do Starc’s bidding; the art of reverse swing no longer felt as uncontrollable as it once did.
Donald believes Starc managed to tap into his inner mongrel more productively. “He bowls a lot more bouncers now than what he did in his initial years. We have talked about it in the past – Get the aggro going, let the batsmen know he can’t come forward, and let the menace always be there.
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“There aren’t many fast bowlers who can bowl yorkers with the new ball as he does. Unlike many, he doesn’t hesitate to bowl the new ball really full, more often than not. That’s when, combined with the short deliveries, you are going to get the edges and hit the stumps. He can reverse from over and round the stumps. He can hurt you with the new and the bad ball.”
Donald then nailed that one Starc trait of ‘attitude’ that Pat Cummins too recently raved about. “You can’t coach a guy to be a leader if he doesn’t want to. There are some who just bowl and go. Starc is one guy who wants it badly. He is like McGrath, Shane Warne and wants to be that person who loves the ball and be a man all the time. You can’t coach stuff like that. Starc has it. He is very very special. If I have to describe him in one word – attitude. He is a proper one-hundred-percenter. He would walk through the wall for his team.”
From being a ‘softie,’ he veered to the other extreme of over-boiling, before he course-corrected to become the modern-day poster boy of the heavy-metal classicalism of a left-arm swing bowler.
