Why we can’t stop watching Mitchell Starc’s dismissal of Ben Stokes | Geoff Lemon

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.

With that, a game whose object is to hit the stumps developed into a game where most deliveries don’t and wouldn’t. The slip cordon dismissal always feels that bit less satisfying, a technicality rather than the viscera of stumps flying. But bowlers became acolytes of the nick, devoting lives to the pursuit of that sliver of timber.

When someone gets bowled these days they’ve usually swung big. The scoring demands of shorter cricket or frustration in longer games see players leave their stumps open, abandoning their guardsmen’s post to let the besieger through. Towards the end of a failing run chase bowlers can get strings of these, like Wahab Riaz recently against South Africa or Mohammad Shami against Afghanistan.

But even if you throw in leg before wicket, Wahab and Shami get a third of their victims to balls en route to the stumps. Starc gets half: 83 so far in his career to catches, 81 bowled or lbw.

Starc is long and lean, a figure stretched out like a Quentin Blake drawing. He lopes to the crease before slinging his arm over with what seems complete ease. Often the ball curves through the air. It may not need to pitch, with plenty of Starc full tosses swerving past a groping shot to strike halfway up a stump. In the 2015 World Cup he bowled a dozen batsmen, including New Zealand’s captain to seal the final. The summer afterwards he warmed up with half a dozen matches up in the 50-over domestic competition for 26 wickets, 17 of them bowled.

Starc bowls full more often than just about anyone. In one-day cricket pitching up tends to be punished, but he counters with a mix of conventional swing with the new ball, reverse swing with the old, and extreme pace throughout. He bowls bouncers, he bowls length, but most often he aims at the stumps and sees what happens.

So this isn’t a case of bowling being reductive. It’s that Starc has reduced the game back to its core principles. He has refined it, streamlined it, economically rationalised it. He has examined other deliveries to see if they spark joy. When they have not, he has thanked them for their service and let them go with love.

The part that he has kept definitely sparks joy. It sparks celebration. It sparks delirium. It sparks those guttural roars when a crowd is so surprised by that it stumbles over its own excitement, getting a reaction out before it has even fully formed in thousands of throats. He sparks Zing stumps and Zing bails, which are so reticent to part these days that they have even resisted Starc, once, when a delivery kissed the upright. He has smashed them more directly ever since.

Most of the time Starc bowls someone before they settle. Of the 65 one-day batsmen he’s castled, 19 of them made ducks, 42 made single figures and 51 made less than 20. But in the current World Cup, Starc has also bowled batsmen with scores. Tamim Iqbal was 62 when velocity forced him to drag on. Kusal Perera was 52 when a yorker beat his big shot.

Then there was Stokes, who was set better than anyone. Stokes who had just batted through for 82 not out when the rest of England collapsed against Sri Lanka, and who was 88 not out when Starc started the 37th over for Australia.

Stokes had been batting since the sixth over, taking a dozen balls to get off the mark and gradually building. In the 36th he twice advanced to smash Pat Cummins through the off side, first with a cut shot then a cover drive. England needed 113 from 84, a steep target but a fair chance with their deep lower order. On a true deck in sunshine they might have romped it, while a slower surface in the gloom made them look vulnerable. But someone still had to exploit that.

Back came Starc for a new spell, first drawing a block from Stokes, then a single to midwicket. That’s about all you can do sometimes, but he doesn’t mind you coming across your front pad. If he misses his length then you might be able to hit straight like Kusal Mendis’ audacious six when Australia played Sri Lanka, but you take your batting future in your hands with each attempt.

Stokes was back on strike with one ball remaining. And here’s where the story is shoved aside for the physical reality. A left-arm bowler, over the wicket, with a left-handed batsman waiting. That batsman has his bat raised as the bowler hits the crease, an action so practised that the bat dips and then rises again even as the ball travels through the air.

Often when we talk about batting decisions, we really mean that a player’s central nervous system and muscle fibres have used years of conditioning to respond instantly before the conscious mind they belong to has even registered what’s happening. Whatever Ben Stokes is thinking, his cricket self thinks he’s facing a full toss. His stance stays open and balance, the bat cocked into a backlift as he winds up to hit straight through the ball.

Basic reverse swing makes a ball veer off a straight line in the opposite direction to what a batsman might expect. But this is something else. Starc’s left arm releases the ball with an angle away from the stumps. It’s already outside an off-stump line when he lets go. His fingers roll the ball out like a left-arm orthodox spinner might. It rotates with the seam at 45 degrees, obtuse, a tiny planet with a new axis.

It’s from this path that reverse swing takes hold of the ball and drags it back. So rather than start straight and curve in, it starts away and bends back in a full Beckham curve. Suddenly it’s heading for the stumps, and now what was a straight full toss dips on Stokes, sharply, savagely.

His wrists are still cocked, the bat raised. Too late he’s realised – or his conditioning has – that he needs to get down. His gloves are dropping but the ball has pitched on the turf beneath his bat’s arc. In the close-up replay, with Stokes’ pads visible to his knees, the bat isn’t even in the frame. It comes down fast, really fast, but by then the ball has hit the outside of off stump and ricocheted flat towards point.

To bowl someone is one thing. To bowl one of the form batsmen in the tournament, on his way a century, when he’s only trying to defend – that’s something else. The enduring image is of Stokes holding his pose, momentarily hiding his off stump. He looks like the definition of solidity that has kept the ball out, but it has gone through him like a ghost through a wall.

So here is the hypnotic sequence you can watch and rewatch. The well-meaning forward defence. The flash of bails and the flash of departing ball. The slow creak as the bat slips from its owner’s hands. Him kicking it away in dejection. And all of that starting with one long, perfect arc, out and back and down and through, pitching to the millimetre.

That ball is Waqar Younis in 1992. Flip the image to a right-arm bowler and a right-hand batsman and there he is. For the reverse-swing yorker, Waqar was the peak of the genre. There’s a reason he has more five-wicket hauls than any bowler in one-day cricket. And there’s a reason that Starc is tracking him, halfway there in less than a third as many matches.

It’s about that whip in their action, an extra flick from the wrist. Aaqib Javed had it, and Wahab at times. Any seamer can reverse a scuffed ball: Hansie Cronje used to, Mitchell Marsh can, Bhuvneshwar Kumar does. But that swing is early, giving time to pick it up. True reverse needs serious pace, and it needs whip. The difference then is in the lateness of swing, and the sharpness, and the dip. That’s when the ball turns homing missile.

You can see Starc’s example as many times as you like. The wrist so relaxed it could be opening a warm bread roll. The gentle placement of a ball into the air. That tilted trajectory, arcing out, swerving back. A quality batsman in the form of his life, racing gravity. Holding the pose in a tribute to fruitlessness. It doesn’t need a how or a why or a when. No artwork really does. Load it up. Back to the start. Press play.