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That tall, fast and slim kid, sure bowls a mean pink ball.
Leading into Thursday’s crucial second Test match, a day-night affair at Brisbane’s Gabba, much has been made of Mitchell Starc’s pink-ball wizardry. With 81 wickets at an average of 17.08, the lissom-limbed southpaw seamer has more wickets than any other with the pink’un in hand. Just what English supporters want to read as their side pitches up at a ground where they haven’t won a Test match in 39 years.
Starc is riding particularly high at the moment. He needs just three more Test wickets to go past Wasim Akram’s 414, when he surely does this series (ahem, this match) he will be top of the tree as the left-arm seamer with the most Test scalps.
In the first Test at Perth Starc picked up the first Ashes 10-wicket haul for an Australian bowler since Shane Warne in 2005, he pocketed Zak Crawley for a pair and bagged Ben Stokes twice. Worryingly for England, Starc has Stokes’s number in Test cricket – 11 dismissals in total with five of them and counting in Australia where there’s a possible eight remaining chances to make it Stokesmite on toast. Smashed Stokeso on rye with feta.
What makes Starc so dangerous with the pink ball? Well, a lot of the same things that make him so dangerous with the red and white balls too. He slings it down at speeds touching 90mph, bowls a full length zoning in on stumps, pads and toes and has a rapid bouncer that can fly past the nose.
Eight years ago today the former England opener Mark Stoneman was batting against Starc under lights with the pink ball in Adelaide during the second Ashes Test of the 2017-18 Ashes. It’s fair to say the experience is still sharp in his memory. “The lights beaming down, the pink ball shining, the crowd roaring and Starc hooping it about at searing pace. Good luck basically. He is a devastating weapon in those conditions.”
Stoneman was pinned lbw in the first innings at Adelaide for 18, a scudding yorker from Starc ending a half-hour examination under lights. “It’s that twilight period that is trickiest,” says Stoneman. “If it is pure daylight or pure floodlight then that is fine, you tend to be able to pick up the ball without any issues, even if it is coming down really fast, but when it is that inbetween light, that’s when it gets really hard.”
Some batters struggle with the glare of the pink ball under lights. Steve Smith, so often England’s Ashes tormentor in chief over the past decade isn’t really a fan. Smith’s nosebleed inducing statistics take something of a nosedive against the pink ball – one hundred in 24 innings at an average of 37.04 compared with his record in regular daytime Test matches of 35 hundreds in 190 innings at an average of 58.31.
Smith has been spotted this week in practice under the Gabba floodlights using the under eye anti-glare strips favoured by the West Indian batter Shivnarine Chanderpaul in the past. It’s this glare that former England captain Alastair Cook lamented in his column for the Sunday Times this week. “When the floodlights shine off the pink leather, it distracts from focusing on the black seam – and if you can’t see the seam as a batsman, you’re in big trouble.”
Starc has of late added a wobble seam delivery to his armoury, a ball that jags in at the left-handed batter like a cross cobra, it’s the one that did for Ben Stokes so emphatically in England’s first innings at Perth.
All told, it’s hard to stop an English mind wandering helplessly to imagined scenes in the Gabba gloaming a few hours from now, England’s batters collectively squinting like Mr Magoo as Starc conjures up glimmering pink, indecipherable hexes.
The former South Africa captain Dean Elgar found himself in something of a similar position in a day-night Test at Adelaide in 2016, as Starc sent Elgar on his way for scores of five and nought as Australia beat South Africa by seven wickets. “Starcy is a serious threat to an opening batter no matter what the colour of the ball,” Elgar says. “In Australia the crowd really respond to seeing him doing his thing and they pump up his tyres, he really rises to the occasion.
“But that black seam on the pink ball is tricky to see against the black sightscreens, put that with the fact that that Adelaide pitch was greener than my lawn … he’s a phenomenal threat in any conditions but even more so in those.”
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One man who had some success against the pink-hued Starc under lights was Dawid Malan. In the 2021-22 Ashes the left-handed batter scored 80 in the first innings of the day-night match at Adelaide. England went on to lose by 275 runs but you can’t have it all.
“I’m actually smiling at the memory,” says Malan of his duel against Starc. “It was so intense and just thrilling to be out there facing this guy. He never said a word but would occasionally smirk at you if he beat you, sometimes that was worse than a sledge, the sheer disdain!”
Even if Starc got him in the end, Malan found a way to score runs against him. “You know Starc is going to come at you, he is after your stumps and pads, he’s the ultimate pole hunter. I was always looking for width to pull or cut away and set up to hit him through midwicket if he gets it slightly wrong and drifts on to the pads, which he can do.
“I wish I could do it all over again.”
England may yet emerge from Brisbane with a smile and some visceral memories of their own to savour. The alternative? They’re left dazzled by the pink-ball wizard once again.
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