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The English team's struggle against bowlers named Mitchell stretches back a generation.

It began with the sheer pace of Mitchell Johnson in 2013-14, and has persisted through the left-arm wizardry of Starc.

In the seventh Ashes series of his career, Starc has taken 26 wickets - rising to the occasion in the unavailability of pace colleagues sometimes more highly rated.

Just four more dismissals in the final Test in Sydney and his total will be the best by anyone in an Ashes series since Johnson over a decade ago.

The Path to Resilience Led To Multiple Seasons of Starc

The Starc's dominant summer - the veteran paceman has also outscored three of England's specialist batsmen with the bat - is the high point of a Test career established through durability, wicket-taking skill and a desire to adapt.

Over the past month and a half he has overtaken Curtly Ambrose, Harbhajan Singh, Shaun Pollock and, most notably, the great Wasim Akram on the list of cricket's greatest bowlers.

By nudging down Wasim, Starc became the most successful left-arm fast bowler in Test history.

And when he takes the field at his home venue for the fifth Test this week, it will be the 27th consecutive Australia Test in a row in which he has featured - a broader streak of four Tests missed from the past fifty-six.

The days of a 20-year-old Starc being told to "toughen up" by then Australia coach Tim Nielsen are a thing of the past.

"Initially it might have stung him a little bit and that is probably the role to push athletes and to try and get them to be stronger than they have been in the past," the former coach stated.

"This was likely one of the talks you have with a lot of young fast bowlers, especially when they start to come into international cricket.

"There were a couple of times where he said he was a bit injured and might need a rest.

"The message was simple than 'I think it's time we have got to find out how much your body can take before it breaks rather than stopping in case it breaks.'"

What Makes Starc So Hard to Face?

So great the change, the national team's coach Andrew McDonald has discussed the prospect of Starc, the oldest of the world-class pace trio, touring England for the next Ashes series in England, by which time he will be thirty-seven.

The legendary Ray Lindwall, who played his last match in 1960, was the most recent Australian fast bowler to wear a Test cap beyond his 37th year.

Doing so would give Starc the chance to join James Anderson, Stuart Broad, Glenn McGrath and Courtney Walsh and become only the fifth seamer to take 500 Test wickets.

Durability can get you so far. To reach that milestone, you must be a constant danger too.

"Paradoxically, even though he is so good, is that at the start of his run-up you can see what he is planning to bowl," stated former England batter Dawid Malan.

"You still have to be able to counter it but you can observe when he is preparing a seam delivery, detect when he is attempting to swing the ball."

Periodically in Starc's career when he has been faulted for being expensive, something with which he has said he has learned to accept.

That negative is heavily counterbalanced by his ability to take wickets.

Of the elite bowlers to have taken more than 350 in Tests, only two modern greats have done so with a more frequent wicket-taking rate than that of Starc.

He may go for runs, but the mean number of balls he needs to take a wicket is incredibly efficient.

"What I found tricky is I always felt like I was comfortable facing him," Malan added.

"It seemed I was seeing the ball well because he has such a nice action, you can track the delivery and there are excellent batting surfaces in Australia but one in every 10 balls he'd bowl an perfect ball and you would just be heading to the pavilion.

"At other times, I wouldn't say you relax but you think 'I have got him here.'

"He might deliver a poor ball because he has tried something different, bowl a slower ball and then abruptly bowls a ball that angles in and hits the off stump.

"He consistently possesses that lethal ball. If you don't respect him each and every delivery he just finds a way of taking your wicket."

A Renaissance Built On Innovation

Although he no longer bowls at the extreme speeds of his second Test these days, Starc's typical speed has remained consistently around 87 miles per hour throughout the most recent phase of his career.

An ability he held from the very start shows no indication of declining.

"He was tall, proper tall, and had really good air speed which stood out," Nielsen says.

"He could also move the ball back into the right-hander."

Swinging the ball and crashing into the toes, pads or grille was, like Johnson, Wasim before him, Starc's main approach during the first two-thirds of his career.

But, after being omitted during the 2019 Ashes tour, Starc incorporated the wobble seam ball to his armoury by the time he returned to England in 2023.

No-one in the world has taken as many as Starc's 118 wickets since the beginning of that 2023 series. Even India superstar Jasprit Bumrah is behind by twelve wickets.

The wobble seam has been a key reason.

"Mitchell Starc just shows you can teach an old job new tricks," stated former Australia pace bowler Jason Gillespie.

"He watched a lot of England's veteran seamers and consulted with them about it.

"For a player aged his mid-thirties to stride and get better is exceptional."

The wobbler has added greater doubt to Starc's game.

When delivering the ball with a wobble seam rather than looking to hoop it, some deliveries move off the seam off the surface after pitching. Others will go on with the arm and bring in the outside edge.

Two of England's top batsmen both fell to Starc wobble balls in the opening hour of the current Ashes.

Starc's number of dismissals caught in the slips has jumped by almost 10% in the past three years.

"The key to the wobble seam is to have your fingers and wrist right aligned with the ball and let go of the ball off your middle finger," Gillespie explains.

"For this delivery Mitchell Starc will hold the ball with the seam positioned towards the off side.

"If you release it at the right time it will wobble down the pitch and that generates uncertainty for the batsman.

"He has been working hard at perfecting this because he feels that the wobble ball going across brings the slip fielders into play and makes his inswinger to the right hander more of a shock weapon."

The English team's struggle by Mitchells may persist for some time yet.