Mithchell Starc
Credit: PTI Photo
Chennai: As Mitchell Starc hops to the crease, consciously trying to keep his large frame lithe, the batter knows he’s going to do one of two things.
He’s either going to swing the ball, and sharply so, into the right-hander with a seam angled towards fine leg or he’s going to hit the same line and length with the cross seam and get the ball to go with the angle.
Of course, he applies a degree of finesse when the situation demands it with a simple range of slower balls, but by and large, he’s about bowling full tilt, looking to make it as uncomfortable for batters as possible.
En route, he has become the most successful left-arm seamer Australian cricket has ever seen, and he did it his way.
There were calls for him to adopt the rabid aggression of Mitchell Johnson early in his career, but Starc realised soon enough that his version of going on the offensive lay in what he could do with the ball. He didn’t need to be in batters' faces any more than he chose to.
On Sunday night, he sent down one of the most beautiful deliveries the IPL has seen in a while and he ‘celebrated’ without so much as an angry glance towards Abhishek Sharma.
He had made Abhishek look bad enough. He didn’t desire to rub it in his face.
At the same time, when his Kolkata Knight Riders’ team-mates swarmed him, he let out a war cry as an afterthought. He knew what a wicket in the first over of an innings means to a team. He also knew that when in war, the troops needed to see the first signs of bloodshed to dive in themselves.
He opened the proverbial ‘Pandora’s Box’. His team-mates broke the box.
The Sunrisers Hyderabad couldn’t deal with all the demons coming their way. Kolkata won their third Indian Premier League title, their first in exactly a decade.
Not only was this quite the turnaround for the team which didn't make the play-offs five out of the nine years since their last triumph, but it was also a shifting in fortunes for Starc for he would not have been picked to be the bellwether of Kolkata’s bowling excellence only seven games ago.
Coming into the league with the weight of the highest price tag (Rs 24.75 crore) in the history of the tournament, Starc, who had last featured in the league eight years ago, was supposed to run through every batting unit in sight.
In his first seven games, he picked up seven wickets and gave away 11.48 runs an over.
Starc could well be one of the finest white-ball bowlers of all time, but IPL doesn’t care much for reputation, it demands quality on the day.
Frankly, had Starc continued to waver, Kolkata might have considered - at least spared a thought - benching him, price tag be damned, but coach Chandrakant Pandit and mentor Gautam Gambhir are not fond of going back on their decisions.
Starc was persisted with and he finished the season with 17 wickets from 14 games at an economy of 10.61. Those figures, though, are not reflective of what Starc actually brings to the table.
“Mitch coming into the team boosted the confidence of the other youngsters. He has been one of the best bowlers in world cricket and he has been in such situations before, it's about understanding Indian conditions and once he did that, it was magic all over," Bharat Arun said during the trophy presentation ceremony.
Sure, at 34-years-old he’s able to impart knowledge to the younger lot by ‘showing them how to be world-class instead of speaking about being world-class’, but this isn’t even about what he imparts, this is about what he does with that 5-1/2 ounce ball in his hand.
In the last two play-offs games for Kolkata, Starc picked up five wickets for 48 runs. In both these instances, the opponents were Sunrisers, and both times, he conjured magic in his first over.
In Qualifier 1, Travis Head was cleaned up with a brute of a ball, shaping away at the last moment. In the final, Abhishek walked away with his jaw open scrapping the floor while the remnants of what he was supposed to protect lay like driftwood behind him.
Those two wickets alone were worth all the money in the world, or at least Rs 24.75 crores.