The Australian’s yorker against England at the World Cup was a rare blend of beauty, mechanics and context – a work of art
Some moments in cricket you can watch forever. A delivery, a catch, a shot. Sport is mostly about context and story and character, the things that put an action in its place. But some rare actions transcend context. When Mitchell Starc bowled Ben Stokes in a World Cup match at Lord’s, the physical fact of it was all that mattered. You can treat that moment as a poem, with a hundred readings each yielding some new discovery. You can have the comfort of sounding out familiar syllables. You can start that clip over and over and over again.
Mitchell Starc hits stumps. That’s what he does. This may seem reductive as a description: don’t all bowlers do the same? But no. The principle of cricket may be guarding a target from missiles, but at a high enough skill level the transaction becomes too simple for the defender. Hence expanding to other modes of dismissal, primarily from the outside edge.
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