Australia’s senior quick excited by competition in squadStarc: ‘If called up at Lord’s I’m ready to go as well’Left out, rotated, overlooked, rested . . . plain old dropped: this was a familiar cycle as far as Mitchell Starc was concerned through the first four years of his international career. By the time he reached his 16th Test the left-arm quick had missed a match immediately after playing one on 11 occasions, having never stitched three together on the trot. One of those omissions was at Lord’s in 2013, switched out for Ryan Harris. But in the 36 Tests that have followed since Australia’s visit here in 2015, the opposite has been true: Starc the clear attack leader. Sure, he has missed plenty of Tests through injury in that period but never due to selection.
With this in mind, that Starc did not feature in last week’s Ashes opener at Edgbaston was the result of a big decision. It was quirky, too, given that in his most recent outing in February he took a neat 10-for-100 against Sri Lanka. But being the senior quick with 211 Test wickets – on the back of a
World Cup where he had claimed 26 scalps – was not enough to save him from the new philosophical approach based primarily around team balance and governed by assessing conditions from venue to venue.