Stats - Is Mitchell Starc the greatest first-over bowler in Test history?

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.

Starc has kicked off two other marquee home series with a wicket in the very first over. He dismissed Stephen Cook at the WACA in 2016, during the first over of a three-match series against South Africa, and cleaned up Prithvi Shaw in Adelaide with the second ball of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy in 2020-21. Starc is the only bowler to claim a wicket in the first over of a Test series on four different occasions.

During Starc's recent spree, he has struck in the opening over in four successive innings across the Kingston, Perth and Brisbane Tests. Only one bowler before him had achieved this feat in Test cricket - Sri Lanka's Dhammika Prasad, who did it against India in 2015, across Colombo's P Sara Oval and SSC grounds.

Striking in the first over in four successive innings is quite rare, even if we consider bowlers who did not bowl the first over of innings. Only two bowlers other than Dhammika and Starc have done it in Tests since the beginning of the ball-by-ball-data era.

India's Sreesanth did this in his debut year in Test cricket in 2006, twice in the first over of innings and twice when he was introduced in the second over. Sri Lanka's Milinda Siriwardana is the other, also in his debut year in 2015; all four when he came on as second change or later.

Starc, in all, has struck in his first over on 25 occasions, taking 28 wickets across them. Since the advent of ball-by-ball data, only England's Anderson (34) and Stuart Broad (33) have taken more wickets in their first overs in Tests than Starc.

Starc's Test career accomplishments will be incomplete without a mention of his heroics in day-night Test matches, and his first-over record in those games. Eight of his 26 first-over wickets have come in pink-ball Tests. The next most in day-night Tests are two each by Suranga Lakmal and Axar Patel.

Starc has definitely benefitted from having had the chance to bowl the first over with the pink ball more than anyone else, on 29 occasions. Still, all other bowlers combined have taken only nine first-over wickets across 65 innings. Two of those nine wickets came in the same over, when Axar struck twice with his first three balls of England's second innings in Ahmedabad in 2021.