Adelaide Test: Off-colour Mitchell Starc struggling with his radar

Mitchell Starc’s wayward bowling yesterday was in keeping with a lengthening trend.

Mitchell Starc in action against India at Adelaide Oval yesterday. Picture: AAP

Mitchell Starc’s wayward bowling yesterday was in keeping with a lengthening trend.

In 13 unlucky innings before yesterday, Starc had taken 12 first-class wickets at 60.5 apiece.

The paceman’s dry run stretches back to immediately after the good old days of Durban, when Australia still had their banned men and sandpaper was free of suspicion and suffixes that rhyme with mate.

Starc was man of the match that day in Durban, which was as good as yesterday was bad, but since then the wickets have dried up.

Yes, his 3-40 from 21.5 overs yesterday in Adelaide are good numbers, but they betray the truth.

The low point came when he was dragged after only two overs with the second new ball.

The quick conceded two fours off the bat and another two to the sundries column.

The eight runs were recorded as byes but it should have been 10 wides, so harsh on poor Tim Paine were the calls by Kumar Dharmasena.

One of the wides, um, byes ­rebounded off the end of Paine’s gloves en route to the boundary, so perhaps spelling Starc was about saving the skipper’s fingers.

After thoroughly examining Paine’s diving skills in the morning, in the afternoon Starc tested the captain’s aerial work, pinging another four byes off a despairing, perpendicular glove.

Then he returned to the tried and true leg-side strategy, spraying another short, wide, ball.

After so much practice, Paine was ready, leaping to spectacularly clutch the ball in his left.

Then, joy at last, Ravi Ashwin heaved the next ball to Marcus Harris on the backward-square fence to give Starc his second wicket.

Normal service resumed in his next over when he squirted another four sundries past his unimpressed skipper.

Ishant Sharma was his third and final victim, but the fact Starc took 15 balls to get him told the tale of the bowler’s day.

His final figures were as flattering as a soft light.

Still, it was his first three-for or better in 14 innings.

Starc’s accounts also need to be read in conjunction with several attendant notes.

Six of those previous 13 innings were in the UAE, which is a friendly and hospitable place unless you happen to be a fast bowler.

Starc s dry run - Sports art

Two of the innings were in Cape Town, where, you might recall, the Australians were preoccupied with one or two distractions.

After that he was injured, succumbing to a what Cricket Australia called a “tibial bone stress fracture in his right leg”, which is apparently something that happens before a stress fracture.

He was also troubled by hamstring tightness on the UAE tour, then was given a sole Shield match to warm up for the Border-Gavaskar series.

Making like the bad Mitchell Johnson, or Chris Matthews at the Gabba, was unhelpful. Wickets with the new ball were sorely needed on the similarly unhelpful track.

But Ed Cowan said Starc would have been more usefully employed bowling with the old ball and less with the new.

Urging people to refrain from harsh judgments — “we always expect our elite sportspeople to be operating at peak levels” — Cowan said Starc was struggling to control the new ball but was bowling well with the old.

“The strategy around using your bowlers is what is the best-case use,” Cowan told The Australian.

“He’s bowling faster with the older ball and cleaning up the tail.”

Cowan said Starc might be better off bowling first change until his confidence levels lifted.

His confidence does appear down. Either that or he’s sore. ­Because after being dragged he was slow to chase a ball punched through mid-off; so slow he was overtaken by the mid-on, Josh ­Hazlewood, who could do without such a chase given he was bowling at the other end.

“I just don’t like his body language,” Mitchell Johnson said on ABC radio.

“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.”