A model of the reliable and durable: Mitchell Starc and a rare piece of cricket history

In the second week of March this year, Mitchell Starc passed a big number: Dennis Keith Lillee’s 355 Test wickets, which was still second for any Australian fast bowler. This coming Saturday, in the fourth week of March, Starc will pass another: as the most expensive player yet to take the field in the Indian Premier League, with a season’s contract a lick under US$3m.

In the modern era, with the focus on cricket’s shift from a long-form demonstration of international pride to a short-form instrument of commerce, most people would probably see the second number as more significant. Lillee was the sensation of the 1970s, but you would have to be nearing 50 to remember seeing him bowl.

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After the first day’s play of the Christchurch Test, Starc was respectful but low-key about wicket 356. “You always know, especially when you’ve got Nathan Lyon in the team letting you know, but it’s good to get it out of the way early enough and then get on with the innings,” he told ABC radio.

“I haven’t actually spent much time with DK [Lillee]. [We’ve] obviously crossed paths through cricket circles [but not] in terms of bowling, but the knowledge is obviously there of what he did for Australian cricket, and how lethal and how good he was with the ball. So, [it’s] humbling to be up there with some of those big names, and probably showing a bit of my age and experience now with how many games I’ve played.”

Nobody can make the case that Starc doesn’t value Tests. One of the game’s most devastating white-ball weapons, this year will only be his third IPL. Every season since 2015 he has recused himself to make sure he’s fit for national duty. That long absence may have driven up his asking price when he finally returned, but he has still foregone millions in the interim.

So perhaps Starc’s response was due to modesty, or to coming from a later generation. Perhaps excitement about 350 wickets seemed passé in the week when James Anderson doubled that tally with his 700th. The era since Lillee has seen numbers boom. Anderson trails Shane Warne’s 708 and Muttiah Muralitharan’s 800, though as a pace bowler against two spinners, he may be an even greater anomaly. Anderson’s longtime bowling partner Stuart Broad and Indian spinner Anil Kumble sit in the 600s, Lyon and Ravichandran Ashwin recently joined Glenn McGrath and Courtney Walsh in the 500s, and eight other players are in the 400s.

And still, reaching Lillee’s feat is major. Aside from Lillee’s symbolic potency, becoming a cricketing icon with that lithe run and that predatory leap into one of the most compelling bowling actions the game has seen, he was prolific in the black and white of the stats. He set the Australian wicket-taking record at 259, the world record at 310, before extending it to his final 355. Only a few years earlier, that sort of number had been thought impossible.

It took the four great fast-bowling all-rounders to reel him in, with Ian Botham and Imran Khan going narrowly ahead before Richard Hadlee and Kapil Dev were first into the 400s. After them, careers were defined by the glut of the 1990s and 2000s. New teams appeared, televisions got hungry, and the volume of Test cricket peaked. Of players with more wickets than Lillee, those four all-rounders and Malcolm Marshall played in the 1970s. The other 21 players debuted between 1984 and 2011. Of those 21, only five played fewer than 100 Tests, with Starc soon likely to reduce that list to four.

Lillee played 70 Tests, substantially fewer than anyone with more wickets. Yet his rate of 5.07 wickets per Test is behind only Ashwin and Muralitharan. Bear in mind that his Test tally misses four seasons at his peak: one with his back injury, two with World Series Cricket, and one when the World XI toured in place of an apartheid South African team in 1971/72.

The World XI captained by Garfield Sobers drew together the game’s biggest stars for four matches. Lillee wrecked them with 24 wickets at 20. The World Series teams led by Clive Lloyd and Tony Greig were similar, and Lillee took 67 wickets at 26. All of these sides were higher quality than most Test opposition, but politics meant players never had these stats included on their records. Botham and Kapil were not recruited for World Series Cricket, Hadlee only played one-day matches, and Imran played five Supertests for 25 wickets. Add Lillee’s unofficial wickets to his Test list and he has 446 of the best, more than anyone short of the 500 club.

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All of which is really to say that Starc passing Lillee on the official list is serious business. The left-armer still gets saddled at times with the early perception of his bowling as erratic, expensive and prone to injury. This is because he had to learn Test cricket on the job, called into the side at a young age, then constantly dropped and recalled as selectors struggled to reconcile his gifts with his problems. As recently as the 2019 Ashes, he sat on the bench four Tests out of five.

Since then, he has turned himself into a model of the reliable and durable, with 206 wickets at 26. He has played 25 of the last 26 Tests in Australia and New Zealand, all five in Pakistan and Sri Lanka in 2022, and seven out of nine last year in India and England. His bowling action will always lead to some wayward offerings, but creates the unplayable as well. His career strike rate is a wicket every 48 balls, a mark that only three players of those beyond Lillee have bettered.

Sitting behind McGrath for all Australian quicks – that’s a piece of history. And this is a rare era. Josh Hazlewood might sneak past Lillee too, given a couple more years. Pat Cummins is a stronger chance, yet to turn 31. The next Australian fast bowler to do it hasn’t yet debuted, and the chance is 15 years away. Maybe much further, if the Test calendar continues to shrink. Long Australian careers for quicks are rare, with the wear of hard pitches and the endless competition from each rising generation. With the past as a guide, it’s worth appreciating what those in our present have done.