Mitchell Starc opens up on the $10m sacrifice behind his extraordinary 100-Test milestone

Mitchell Starc will this Sunday become just the second Australian fast bowler to reach the century milestone – but it’s a mark he’s only been able to reach because of extraordinary sacrifices.

Brett Lee played his last Test at 32.

For Mitchell Johnson it was 34. Same deal with Dennis Lillee. Jeff Thomson’s final Test spanned his 35th birthday and yielded match figures of 1-101 from 19 overs.

Mitchell Starc has outstayed them all.

Granted sport science and workload management has advanced plenty from the days of DK and Thommo, but Starc’s effort to reach the 100-Test milestone in Jamaica this weekend is a gargantuan feat on so many fronts. It would have been one thing had Starc crawled to the landmark, previously reached only by Glenn McGrath of Australian pacemen.

For one thing, McGrath – though in a class of his own for skill and consistency – never had the pace of Starc, who has exceeded 140 km/h for much of his career and had to bear the physical brunt of all that comes with such strain.

The strapping around his ankle as he spoke this week was just the tip of the iceberg of pain for a player who has regularly baulked at detailing the nature of his various ailments.

Mitchell Starc continues to be a force at the age of 35. Picture: Getty

As noted by Australian coach Andrew McDonald during the week, Starc – who turns 36 in January – was still hitting the mid-140 km/h range during Australia’s second Test win in Grenada.

That was Test No.99 for Starc, who Starc the 17th Australian to notch a century, but just the fourth specialist bowler after Shane Warne, Nathan Lyon and McGrath.

The left-arm destroyer is also just five wickets away from joining that trio as the only men to take 400 Test wickets for Australia, and could achieve the milestone in the third and final Test against the West Indies, beginning at Sabina Park on Sunday morning (AEST).

Far from being carried to the line, Starc enters his 100th match in the format with 22 Test wickets at 20.86 for the calendar year, including carrying the burden of Australia’s pace responsibilities pretty much one-out in Sri Lanka at the start of 2025.

His feats at World Cups make him a white-ball great and yet he has always valued Test cricket the most, almost as if to prove a point to himself given he had found it the toughest of the three formats to master in his early years.

A young Starc (R) with teammates Peter Siddle and James Pattinson.

As one of Twenty20 cricket’s most potent new-ball bowlers, Starc’s decision to bypass the Indian Premier League for the best part of a decade is estimated to have cost him around $10 million dollars but who knows how many extra Tests it has yielded him?

“I wouldn’t change it. Test cricket was the hardest format to either feel like I was good enough for or felt like I was capable of doing so then to get that opportunity, I wasn’t going to let that pass at all,” Starc said.

“So the years that I did miss franchise cricket or didn’t play anything, I don’t regret that at all. To get my body in as good a spot as I could for Australia to play 99 games, or whatever it may be, spend some time at home. Spend some time with (wife) Alyssa (Healy) and family, that’s the reasons why I did those things.”

It also led him to become a poster boy for scarcity theory. When he finally made himself available again for the IPL in late 2023, he became the most expensive player in league history, reaping $4.43 million in joining the Kolkata Knight Riders.

Starc (C) is one of the best white-ball bowlers of all time – but made significant sacrifices as far as he IPL is concerned. Picture: Getty

Starc’s bowling average of 27.39 is not as impressive on paper as those of Josh Hazlewood (24.32) or Pat Cummins (22.16). But Starc’s strike rate of 48.02 is second only to Dale Steyn among the top 20 wicket-takers in Test history. This is the Starc trade-off, and it is hard to argue that the good hasn’t been worth the bad.

Because they are more frugal, Cummins and Hazlewood’s guile can often damn Starc to be pigeonholed as a crude brute force stumps splaying swinging yorker merchant. He is that, and his most iconic moments have largely fallen into that genre. But as he noted two days out from the Test, he has expanded his arsenal significantly, finding ways to remain impactful not only with the new ball or scything tailenders with reverse swing.

He has found other modes of attack, including picking up the wobble seam from Cummins and Hazlewood after being omitted for much of the 2019 Ashes as selectors focused on economy.

Mitchell Starc (L), Pat Cummins and Josh Hazlewood have formed one of he most feared fast-bowling units on the planet. Picture: AAP

McGrath continued to play international cricket until after his 37th birthday, and while there is the lure of breaking through to win away Test series against England and India in 2027, Starc is taking a shorter-term view.

“It’s too far down the road to think of so purely looking to this series, and then obviously a big summer, and we’ll reassess from there.”

A dead rubber (notwithstanding World Test Championship machinations) in Jamaica in the middle of the Australian Winter is about as close to off-Broadway as playing a Test for Australia gets.

It has been too long a trip for friends or family to get here. But it is also fitting in a couple of ways. One, it is a pink-ball Test, fixtures over which Starc has imposed trademark dominance for a decade. And it is also weirdly perfect that a man who has put Test cricket a clear No. 1, when he so easily could have opted another way, will achieve this feat at a venue far from home in a place the locals are so uninvested that about half the ground will be shut for the duration of the Test. For Mitchell Starc, it hasn’t mattered whether it’s Sabina Park or the SCG, Galle or the Gabba, Dubai or Durban. The baggy green has been the priority.

Originally published as Mitchell Starc opens up on the $10m sacrifice behind his extraordinary 100-Test milestone