Mitchell Starc is currently on a hot streak, having bagged Player-of-the-Match awards in three successive Tests, including two in the ongoing Ashes series. He has taken six-fors (or better) in each of those three Tests, and bettered his career-best figures in back-to-back innings. His dream run started in Kingston, during his 100th Test match in July. Starc bagged 6 for 9 in West Indies' second innings, including three wickets in the first over. 

He followed up by consigning Zak Crawley to a pair in the first Ashes Test in Perth, dismissing him in the first over in both innings. Crawley was lucky to escape that fate in the pink-Ball Test in Brisbane, but Ben Duckett succumbed to the first ball he faced, in the first over of the match. Over these three Tests, Starc has extended his tally of first-over wickets in Test cricket to 26.

He is now only three behind England's James Anderson, whose 29 scalps are the most in the format. Starc was equal second before the Kingston Test, alongside Glenn McGrath and Chaminda Vaas who had 20 wickets apiece while bowling the first over of a Test innings. Starc's numbers are all the more remarkable considering he's had fewer chances of bowling the first over of innings than some other bowlers.

He has so far bowled the first over for Australia on 171 occasions, which is well behind Anderson's 292 for England. Vaas and McGrath have bowled the first over 180 and 199 times respectively. Duckett's wicket at the Gabba was Starc's eighth in the first over of a Test match. With it, he equalled Anderson for most wickets in the first over of Tests, and went ahead of Australia's Ray Lindwall, New Zealand's Richard Hadlee and India's Kapil Dev, who all did so seven times. 

Three of these eight Starc wickets have come with first ball of Test matchs. All three victims were left-hand batters - Dimuth Karunaratne at Galle in 2016, Rory Burns at the Gabba in 2021, and Yashasvi Jaiswal in Adelaide in 2024. Pedro Collins is the only other bowler to have struck three times with the first ball of a Test match. Bangladesh's Hannan Sarkar was the batter on all three occasions. Overall, Starc has four wickets with the first ball of an innings.

Apart from the three with the first ball of Test matches, he has dismissed John Campbell, another left-hander, off the first ball of West Indies' second innings in Kingston in July. Vaas and West Indies' Curtly Ambrose also have four such wickets each, but Hadlee is ahead with six. Two of Hadlee's six first-ballers came off the first ball of a Test match. 

Starc's triple-wicket over in Kingston was also almost one of its kind. Only one bowler before him had taken three wickets in the first over of a Test innings - Irfan Pathan, who took a hat-trick to kickstart the Karachi Test in 2006 against Pakistan. Most of Starc's first-over wickets have been iconic, coming on grand occasions. Cleaning up Burns around his legs with the first ball of the 2021-22 Ashes series was an all-time reel-worthy effort. 

The feat of taking a wicket off the very first ball of an Ashes series had only been achieved once before, in 1936, when Ernie McCormick had Stan Worthington caught behind, also at the Gabba. Starc later became the first bowler to take a wicket in the first over of an Ashes series twice by dismissing Crawley in Perth last month.

Credit: Independent News Pakistan (INP)