Brutal Mitchell Starc spell one to remember amid Australia batters' tour to forget

The Guardian

10 hours ago

Modern sport reporting casually reaches for words like 'brutality' and 'carnage' where their usage even as metaphor is overblown. The end of the third Test in Kingston, though, warranted both. Australia's fast bowlers destroyed West Indies for 27, a single run higher than the lowest innings score in Test history.
The batting lasted 14.3 overs, the third-shortest innings on record. Mitchell Starc, curling the pink Dukes ball, took 6 for 9. Scott Boland's 3 for 2 came in the form of a hat-trick. It was a sporting annihilation, the lowest West Indies total ever by 20 runs, worse than any time during the struggles of their earliest years or their recent decades. Australia swept the series 3-0.
No Test innings has started so badly. Starc didn't need floodlights to make the ball move – Jamaica's afternoon heat was enough. Three wickets in his first over, not quite completing his hat-trick in his second, but taking two more in his third. The 35-year-old's haul from his first 15 balls of the innings is the earliest in an innings that any bowler has completed a five-for.
The Test had started quietly for Starc: a duck with the bat, one early wicket, then 11 not out. At the last, his milestones came together: his 100th Test, his 400th wicket, and at one point figures of 5 for 2, equalling Ernie Toshack for the cheapest five-wicket haul.
Swing away from John Campbell had the left-hander nick – the fourth wicket in Starc's career from the first ball of an innings – then swing into the right-handers trapped Kevlon Anderson fourth ball and bowled Brandon King right afterwards.
The target of 204 was challenging in the conditions, but for a proper side should have been within reach. For West Indies, it might as well have been circling the planet in high-Earth orbit. Minds were not in attendance. Anderson not only left a ball that hit him on the ankle, but allowed himself to be talked into a review that showed a bullseye, the middle of middle stump. King saw that inswing and decided that the best response would be to leave open the gate and punch through cover on the up. It wasn't.
Mikyle Louis kept out the hat-trick ball, barely, but an over later he and Shai Hope were both beaten by swing while defending, struck in front. After Louis, Starc raised the ball for his 400th, and after Hope, for his fifth of the innings. Louis to that point was the only runscorer on the card, while being fourth to fall, before Josh Hazlewood nicked off West Indies captain Roston Chase as the sixth.
Justin Greaves and Alzarri Joseph somehow defended their way through eight overs, helped by Sam Konstas at third slip twice dropping what would have been Starc's sixth wicket. But that opened the stage door for Boland to have his moment, with his signature seam movement and length hitting the top of off stump.
From the first ball of his second over, Boland had Greaves edge to the cordon. Second ball, the left-handed Shamar Joseph got one cutting in to strike his pad, not given but showing three reds on review. And from the third, the right-handed Jomel Warrican was beaten by movement the opposite way, losing off stump. Slip catch, lbw, bowled: a hat-trick via a fast bowling trinity.
Konstas ushered West Indies past the lowest Test score, misfielding a stolen single, but Starc cleaned up Jayden Seales next ball, ending a supposed day-night Test hours before the lights had the chance to come on for a third time. It was the full stop on a series where batting has been woeful, even when bowling has deserved commendation. West Indies averaged 14.95 runs per wicket: only six times has a team over three Tests or more done worse. In national terms, 22.75 was the 14th worst Australian series average. It was the second time in Test history that a series with at least 12 innings failed to produce a century on either side.
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Conditions were tough, but better players have managed worse. After falling to 99 for 6 by stumps on the second night, Australia resumed to have overnight stayer Cameron Green bowled leaving the first ball of the day. The innings was wrapped up for 121, a loss of 22 for 4 on the third day, after 225 all out in the first. When Alzarri Joseph bowled Hazlewood to complete 5 for 27, it was a moment of home team celebration, though he wouldn't have been expecting to be batting 32 balls later: the earliest entrance for a No 8 in Test history.
It summed up the contradiction of the series, that even an Australian team batting so badly could win three matches so comfortably: by 159, 133, and finally 176 runs. After the burst of hope when West Indies knocked over Australia in Brisbane to start 2024, a loss so humiliating is even more crushing. The home team's bowling deserves praise, their fielding had highs alongside some lows. But a team that can't bat can't win, and this team can't do either.
The Australian batters will be keen to scrub the trip as an aberration, though the question marks won't fade so easily. At least it ended with a day that the Australian bowlers will always be happy to remember.