You would have to chloroform Mitchell Starc to stop him playing in the Boxing Day Test. Admittedly, when you look into the eyes of Cricket Australia fixer Pat Howard, you can see him pulling off a Breaking Bad move with a metal post and a bike lock. Whatever it takes. But as long as Starc doesn’t find himself confined to a cellar, he’ll be at the MCG unless his foot is falling off.
Starc, bear in mind, played the Test before Boxing Day as his career started in 2011, then again in 2012, and was left out for the next match both times. The latter was a tactical ploy to give Mitchell Johnson a test run – Johnson bowled scary-fast, broke a couple of Sri Lankan arms, and took the first step in his rehabilitation that ended with the next year’s Ashes whitewash.
Starc, though, didn’t get another shot at the biggest date in Australian cricket’s calendar until 2016. Even then he growled over it in the lead-up like a dog with a pig’s ear. Try to take this off me and I’ll bite. He made pointed comments about playing all six matches, and realised his aim. He took the same approach after this season’s Brisbane Test, when there was talk about Pat Cummins being rested. “I expect it to be the same squad and hopefully the same line-up going into Adelaide,” he fired off in the general direction of selectors.
Yes, team management is looking at the future. The Ashes are won, and there’s South Africa in March. But the fast bowler’s existence is a tenuous one, and that of bowling cartels even more so. Like butterflies, the most brilliant appear before you for mere days or weeks before disappearing from this earth. The pioneers of the fast opening pair, Jack Gregory and Ted McDonald, played 11 Tests together in 1921. England’s quartet of 2005 never reunited. Injuries strike, form shifts, conditions and opponents change. Moments lost in time, tears in rain.
Keeping this group together is the way to keep England, literally and figuratively, on the back foot. Of course pace alone doesn’t work: find any footage of Sachin Tendulkar calmly deflecting Shoaib Akhtar into the crowd at the 2003 World Cup. Faster arrival can just mean faster departure. But pace plus accuracy is what Starc, Cummins, and Josh Hazlewood have brought. It’s the relentlessness that gets you.
Elite players can cope with a delivery north of 90 miles or 140 kilometres. But when it continues all day, each ball requiring a faster reaction speed than against most bowling, eventually mistakes will be made. You saw it in Perth, when Jonny Bairstow was well set on 119, but Starc was still able to rip a curving yorker through him in a shower of Zing bails.
You saw it in Adelaide, when Dawid Malan battled through the night session up until the six-pronged shadow of stumps, only for one late Cummins delivery to spear in from wide of the crease and through his forward defence. What could have been a tight run chase instead folded the next day.
Starc is Australia’s pace talisman, since his withering 2015 spell to Ross Taylor that touched 100 miles an hour on a Perth track deader than the Babylonian Empire. But Hazlewood this Ashes has bowled the fastest of his career, while his accuracy and ability to have balls leap from a fuller length have made his bouncers the hardest to handle. Cummins, meanwhile, has chimed in with key wickets at key times, including the England captain thrice.
On the Guardian’s Ashes podcast this week, Vic Marks spoke about facing the world’s fastest bowlers in 1980s county cricket. “There were more around, but there weren’t – like the Englishmen have to face here – there weren’t three. They’ve talked about that a lot in this series, because there’s no respite,” he said. “The Aussies have had three genuinely quick bowlers. The only parallel is that West Indies side of the late 70s, early 80s.
“A lot of it, of course, is just getting accustomed. You can get accustomed. But you just needed to be used to this ball coming towards you probably around the 90 mile an hour mark, which is a huge leap from the 83, 84 mile mark. We’ve seen that in this series.”
For someone who was in and out of the team 11 times before his 15th Test, you can tell why Starc is sensitive about keeping the good times rolling. The spectre of injury has hung around him like the Ghosts of Christmas – he left this year’s India series halfway through with a busted foot, and missed the subsequent Bangladesh tour.
Those absences created space for Cummins to prove his own fitness, as well as his worth in difficult conditions. No wonder he came back to home soil confident. But for Cummins too, man of the match aged 18 on debut, then man of the bench for six injury-blighted years, there must be a compulsion to make the most of every day of fitness.
Partly, as with Starc’s bruised heel, it has to be down to whether the bowler thinks he can get through a match, and how badly he wants to. “After my mid-20s I stopped getting my back scanned,” said former Australian quick Jason Gillespie on a previous Guardian podcast. “I just didn’t want to know. It’d light up like a Christmas tree.
“It sounds very simple but: it’s about knowing your own body, knowing what you can and can’t do. Get the advice from sports science and physio, but at the end of the day it’s your career. You have to take that ownership. Fast bowling’s bloody hard work. That’s the brutal reality.”
Dirk Nannes echoed the comments on ABC radio during the Perth Test. Had he been scanned before the 2010 World T20, he said, there’s no way his list of niggles would have allowed him to go. Instead he relied on himself to manage his body, and became the leading wicket-taker in the global tournament as Australia made the final. That changed his life via Indian Premier League contracts.
The feeling seems to be that once you acknowledge minor injury, you allow it a chance to swarm you. It’s like leaving the field during a rain shower – you can’t then get back on until the weather is perfect. Accede to a lack of fitness in one area, and a dozen more will make themselves known.
Part of the magic of the 2013-14 whitewash was a bowling attack kept together throughout. Johnson, Ryan Harris and Peter Siddle played all five Tests, then went onto South Africa. The current group wants to keep its run going to South Africa as well, then tune up through the next Australian summer, and on to England to disrupt the home-side hegemony that the Ashes have become.
Of course Australia’s pace focus has failed there before. When Michael Clarke’s team arrived bullishly in 2015, bowling Starc and Johnson in concert, pace only briefly prospered at Lord’s. Bouncer barrages don’t have the same venom in England’s green and pleasant land. But Starc was greener then as well, and Johnson a bit more pleasant, admitting he had largely lost the competitive fire that fuelled his 2013 locomotive. Combined with accuracy, smarts, and hostility though, speed in England can still be decisive. No one who saw 2005 can deny it.
As far as the alchemy of attacks goes, this one, at only three Tests old, has turned lead to gold. Caution might suggest that Starc should rest, but momentum – whether regarded as inexact science or superstition – has him desperate to play. For Starc to sit out, something would actually have to be breaking, bad.
