Starc’s five-wicket blast routs New Zealand
Australia in 86-run romp as paceman creates havoc Boult’s hat-trick in vain after Black Caps collapse
For most of the past four years, ever since winning the 2015 World Cup, Australia have been abject in one-day international cricket.
Their team selection and strategy has been disjointed. Players have been plucked, and then discarded, haphazardly.
The way they have rested players ceaselessly – Mitchell Starc, played only three ODIs in 18 months before this tournament – has betrayed how bilateral ODIs have been an afterthought.
But, for Australia, the World Cup changes everything. They have won four of the five previous editions, lording it over the competition as if they were a regime’s favoured football team in the old Communist bloc.
This year, as the World Cup loomed into view and then arrived, Australia’s ODI side have metamorphosed from abject to imperious. Going back to March, they have now won 15 of their past 16 ODIs. That now includes seven wins out of eight in this World Cup.
At times – as Australia were reduced to 92 for five, and then as Kane Williamson and Ross Taylor put on a 50run partnership to take New Zealand to 97 for two in pursuit of 244 – the notion that New Zealand could reprise their victory in the group stages of the last tournament did not seem outlandish.
In the end, they were overpowered, falling apart after Williamson’s dismissal to lose by 86 runs.
Besides Williamson, Trent Boult – who took a last-over hat-trick – and the hostility of Lockie Ferguson, the gap between the sides was made to look like a chasm.
More than anything, that owed to Starc, a man who makes taking matchwinning five-wicket hauls look as routine as mowing the lawn.
After going wicketless in his threeover opening burst, Starc returned from licking ice pops as relief from the suffocating heat and signing autographs on the boundary edge, to take five for 15 in his last 6.4 overs.
In 2015, Starc shared the top wickettaker-in-the-competition award with Boult, whose hat-trick to limit Australia was a reminder of his sustained class.
But Starc now has 24 wickets in the tournament, seven clear of the next best. With 169 wickets at 20.60 apiece, at a rate of more than two per game, Starc’s credentials as an all-time great of the ODI game are beyond doubt.
The win cemented Australia’s lead in the group table and Starc said: “I think our chances of winning the tournament are as good as any other team now. We’ve always talked about peaking at the back-end of the tournament.
“I don’t think we’ve quite had the perfect game as a bowling group. But we’re finding ways to scrap and restrict teams. And we keep improving every game. We’re finding ways to win. A big part of that is our calmness.”
The clash between Williamson and Starc was about as good as this tournament gets: a player who has made two peerless centuries against the tournament’s leading wicket-taker. As such, it always had the air of being match-defining.
When Starc was thrown the ball for his second spell, New Zealand needed 152 from 25 overs with eight wickets in hand, and were slightly ascendant.
Williamson promptly steered consecutive twos, placing the ball immaculately and running sharply, before Starc angled a fractionally slower cross-seam delivery across Williamson. Williamson misjudged his dab to third man, a staple of so many of his classic ODI innings, and walked off for 40.
At 97 for three in pursuit of 244, this ought not to have been a terminal blow for New Zealand. But such has been Williamson’s overwhelming influence so far this tournament that it immediately felt like one. With his customary mixture of full, swinging deliveries, yorkers and bouncers, Starc crushed New Zealand.
The Black Caps are normally renowned as perhaps the savviest and most game-aware side around: a team with limitations, but the sagacity to conceal these. Only, it did not seem that way as Taylor attempted to heave Pat Cummins across the line and Colin de Grandhomme picked out long-off from his very first ball, against Steve Smith’s part-time leg spin.
With Starc in such a mood New Zealand, of course, needed to plunder runs from elsewhere. Only, after Starc had blown open their middle order, they may have been better served by abandoning the notion of victory. For New Zealand’s gravest threat of being eliminated from the tournament is if their run rate veers south, opening a path for Pakistan or – more likely – Bangladesh to sneak above them on run rate.
Such a comprehensive defeat here keeps that possibility alive; restricting Australia to, say, a 35-run victory would have gone a long way to closing it off.
An easy Australian victory was not what was promised by the opening skirmishes of this contest. New Zealand’s first-change bowler Ferguson, who is rapidly acquiring the aura that purveyors of extreme pace do, dismissed David Warner with a brutish bouncer from his first ball.
When Smith picked out Martin Guptill at short square leg – just 17 metres from the bat – in Ferguson’s next over, and Guptill took perhaps the catch of the tournament to date, intercepting a full-blooded pull at full stretch, Australia were 46 for three.
Their top order had failed them for the first time this tournament. But contrasting innings from Usman Khawaja – who hit just two boundaries in his first 106 balls – and the fluent Alex Carey lifted Australia to 243 for nine despite Boult’s hat-trick.
By the day’s end Australia, once again, were toasting the brilliance of their own left-armer.