If you glance at Australia’s team sheet and think of the 2015 World Cup, not much has changed. Aaron Finch and David Warner still open the batting. Steve Smith takes one of the driving seats in the middle order. Glenn Maxwell comes after that to set up the late surge. And with the ball, Mitchell Starc and Patrick Cummins partner up for pace and more pace.
All of the major pieces are still in places. But coming into the 2019 World Cup, the current setup was lacking a couple of important starting pieces. One was the way that Starc conducts himself at the start of a bowling innings. Another was Finch’s equivalent for batting. Australia’s first match against Afghanistan on Saturday suggested that both these problems have a chance of being solved.
Finch is known for fast starts. He has a mostly simple game made up of booming straight drives that can expand to midwicket lathers, and using this expedient his boundaries pile up faster than Tory leadership candidates. In the 20-over format he’s the guy who set a world record score of 156 and then beat it with a leg in the air.
In Sri Lanka in 2016, facing a series of rough and worn spinning pitches, Finch adopted the maxim of getting your opponents before they got you. Reasoning that the new ball was the best chance to score, he played innings like his 55 off 19 balls at Dambulla just to do the team thing and get Australia off to a decent start. Banking the rewards while they were there to take.
But last October his limited-overs game fell in a trough, repeatedly getting out for single figures across a couple of dozen matches. “Finchy felt like India had a homing beacon on his front knee,” said his confidante Maxwell on The Final Word podcast. Captaincy of a rebuilding team seemed to weigh heavily. Spooked by the prospect of leading a team into a World Cup while in a personal rut, he retreated to a cautious approach and was able to grind out a string of huge scores in India and the Arab Emirates.
But all of that has left Finch stranded between selves: not playing like the batsman who first won his spot and then the captaincy, nor truly being the new version of himself that he’d adopted.
Mujeeb Ur Rahman is 18 years old. A tall spinner who bowls every variety of right-arm tweak, he has more wickets during the first period of ODI fielding restrictions than any spinner since the last World Cup. And he only debuted at the end of 2017; when Finch and company lifted the previous trophy, Mujeeb would have been doing the 2010s Afghan equivalent of staring moodily at his Shannon Doherty posters while listening to his Walkman.
His first two overs while opening the bowling have never gone for more than 13 runs. Until last weekend, when Finch clouted him for 22. The Australian, conversely, had never got off to as fast a start.
Flip to the bowling innings and Starc was equally about the fast start. In 2015 his modus operandi was to swing the new ball at tremendous pace, throw one in fast and full, and demolish the stumps as it swerved in the air. New Zealand captain Brendon McCullum got the most famous version in that World Cup final, but Starc had been doing it for a while.
He arrived at that year’s World Cup as a monster, even though much of the world didn’t appreciate it yet. While preparing with half a dozen domestic 50-over matches, he bowled 17 batsmen among his 26 wickets.
He’d blazed through international line-ups too. When Starc took six for 28 to nearly win the impossible World Cup group match against New Zealand in Auckland, it was the fifth time he’d taken a five-wicket haul in ODIs. That was one fewer than the great left-armer Wasim Akram. Starc had played 35 matches. Wasim played 356.
But that was then. In Starc’s 41 matches since, he hasn’t taken another five-for. His record is still exceptional, but his early strikes haven’t been as frequent. In the last year and a half he’s missed a lot of games with injury, worn out at the end of Test series or with the endless list of fast-bowling ailments. The most noticeable thing about the team’s recent work is how little he’s been a feature.
Yet come the start of the big contest and there he was. Afghanistan have two openers who redefine aggression, in Hazratullah Zazai and Mohammad Shahzad. But Shahzad wasn’t trying anything audacious against Starc. Just to work the ball off his pads from a leg stump line. Except it surged fuller than it looked, and it swung late, far too late. Past the shot, into the ankle, onto the stumps. There was been talk of the Kookaburra ball not moving this season, but this one did. A proper blast from the past.
Of course one performance isn’t enough to draw meaningful conclusions. And one is tempered by the fact that Afghanistan are still a team with limitations. But these are glimpses suggesting that two of Australia’s keys may be finding their way back to what made them dangerous. Over the coming weeks, Australia could find more in common with 2015 than just the names on the sheet.
