On the eve of his 100th Test, Mitchell Starc has fought his way to greatness

Australia Broadcast Center

12-07-2025

On Sunday morning Australian time, Mitchell Starc will become just the second fast bowler to feature in 100 Test matches for Australia.
It's a remarkable feat, especially considering his suitability to Test cricket was a topic of debate for long swathes of his early career.
Always a world beater with the white ball, he was often labelled too expensive, too wayward and too soft to be consistently effective with the red.
But as his career has progressed, those critiques have grown fewer and further between.
And on the eve of his milestone match — fittingly under lights against the West Indies in Jamaica — he can look back on a career defined by longevity, fight and propelled into greatness by the instalment of day/night Test cricket.
Starc has always been an easy scapegoat.
His brand of adventurous, stump searching strike bowling is high stakes stuff — exhilarating when it comes off, but ugly and impossible to miss when it doesn't.
Often, when things have gone wrong for Australia, Starc has taken the blame.
In England, particularly, his exploits have been put under the microscope.
Spells of expensive bowling in Australia's 2013 and 2015 Ashes defeats led to selectors determining him unsuited to English conditions and choosing him for just one game in the 2019 series against the Old Enemy.
But in 2023, he was the leading wicket-taker and a key figure in Australia's retention of the urn on enemy soil.
In a series not short on talking points, Starc's English redemption flew under the radar, but it was a key marker in his quiet solidification as a Test match great.
His temperament, too, was often called into question during his early years.
A young Starc was shy, understated and certainly not what the Australian public had come to expect of its strike bowlers.
Despite sharing a first name and job description, he was a different person entirely to his notoriously fierce predecessor Mitchell Johnson, who himself didn't always know what to make of his more mild-mannered namesake.
"I just don't like his body language," Johnson said on commentary for the ABC during Australia's 2018 loss to India in Adelaide.
"He hasn't given a bit of a glare or puffed his chest out with a good follow-through, let the batsman know he's in the contest, that he's going to rip the pegs out."
Shane Warne, too, was often critical of Starc. He was regularly exasperated by Starc's lack of on field verve and helped to cultivate his reputation as a lower-order destroyer.
That's a label that has clung tight to Starc, but it is at the top of an innings, rather than at its end, that he has shone particularly bright.
His series opening dismissal of Rory Burns, bowled after leaving his leg stump inexplicably unguarded, proved to be the enduring image of a 2021/22 Ashes which Australia dominated and is one of three times that Starc has taken a wicket with the opening ball of a Test.
While his overall record mightn't be as impressive as the metronomic Josh Hazlewood or the generational Pat Cummins, Starc's ability to conjure those tone-setting moments is unmatched.
Often forgotten is Starc's stellar record in Sri Lanka, a country notoriously difficult for fast bowlers.
On a spitting Gaulle graveyard that saw Australia succumb to a 229-run loss in 2016, Starc took 11 wickets.
Only a matter of days later, in Colombo — also a world away from a floodlit Australian wicket — Starc would take seven in another losing cause.
35 Sri Lankan wickets at an average of 16 are hardly the numbers of a soft, flat track bully.
However, for Starc, nothing has been as career defining as the introduction of day/night Test cricket.
In the almost 10 years since the very first Test match played under lights, Starc has become the undisputed king of the pink ball, taking 74 wickets at an average of 18. That's compared to his overall Test match record of 395 wickets at 27.39.
No other bowler has even come close to his level of magenta mastery, with colleagues Nathan Lyon, Josh Hazlewood and Pat Cummins his nearest rivals, taking 43, 37 and 35 wickets in the format respectively.
Again and again, Starc has delivered under lights.
He picked up match figures of 9/97 against New Zealand in 2019 and has taken a remarkable four five wicket hauls with the pink ball, but his best performance — and best Test match figures overall — came against India in December last year.
With his team well beaten in the first Test, Starc began the second after Indian batting prodigy Yashavi Jaiswal had accused him of bowling too slowly.
It was a brave move by the precociously talented opener, and one that backfired horribly. Starc caught him plumb in front with another game opening delivery on his way to a first innings return of 6/48.
It's hard to say what makes Starc such a different beast with the pink ball, and he's not quite sure himself.
"Nothing changes too much," Starc said in December 2024.
"I'm still running in trying to attack the stumps, trying to swing it.
"Some days it works. Sometimes it doesn't. I don't know (the reason why). I can't tell you."
He's far from a one dimensional, floodlight dependent player, but it's his mastery of the pink ball that has well and truly catapulted Starc into the pantheon of fast bowling greats.
And there's something special about the scheduling gods conspiring to put it in his hand for this week's milestone Test.
ABC Sport will blog every ball of Australia's third Test against the West Indies in Jamaica, starting at 4:30am AEST on Sunday, July 13.