Mitchell Starc's searing best gives Australia the edge

Mitchell Starc is probably not the best bowler in the world, but he might be the bowler who bowls the best balls. And on Saturday afternoon, a couple of minutes after five o'clock, Ollie Pope faced one of Starc's best.

It was the ball that left-arm fast bowlers dream about: fast, full, angling across, swinging back in, bursting through the gap between bat and pad. On a day where England's bowlers hardly bowled a ball that would have hit the stumps between them, Starc ripped Pope's middle stump out of the ground.

Starc stuck his right arm out with his first finger raised and let out a scream so loud that every muscle in his neck was visible, popping out from under his skin. He wore an expression of genuine anger, giving Cameron Green a high-ten hard enough to sting his hands. It was close to perfection.

And the context made it even better. Starc's first ball of the over, his third, was angled across Pope, holding its line up the slope to beat his outside edge. It created enough doubt that, facing the next ball, Pope planted his front foot slightly tentatively and played down an off-stump line.

He missed the ball by inches, his head falling over to the off side. After it flicked his pad and crashed into his stump, Pope kept falling. He peered around his right hip to see the stump lying on the floor, with a camera cable attached to it. England were 13 for 2, needing another 358 to win.

Starc has never been - and will never be - a bowler who exerts control, and Australia have never quite trusted him in England for that reason. Four years ago, he played only one of the five Ashes Tests, with Peter Siddle and James Pattinson among those preferred; in Birmingham last week, Scott Boland got the nod ahead of him.

At Lord's, Starc started the second innings by spraying one so far outside Zak Crawley's off stump that it was called a wide; three balls later, with Ben Duckett on strike, he so short and wide outside his off stump that the man who prides himself on never leaving the ball had no other choice.

Starc's economy rate across his Test career is 3.33 and in this match, he has gone at 4.74 an over. None of his 27 overs has been a maiden and at times, England have been able to get after him. But his attributes are irresistible: height, bounce, pace, swing, all from a left-arm angle.

That cocktail lends itself to chances. At the end of Starc's first over, he found some extra bounce from a length to take Duckett's outside edge, Green unable to cling on as he flung himself to his left in the gully; his next ball, the first of his second over, was near identical but this time to the right-handed Crawley, and resulted in a leg-side strangle.

Two balls later, he pinned Duckett with another beauty, a ball which angled in, swung away and thumped him on the knee roll of his back pad. Given out on field by Chris Gaffaney, Duckett survived on review but only just, ball-tracking predicting it would have missed the top of off stump by a hair's breadth.

Starc was baffled when his catch at deep fine leg off Duckett was given not out by the third umpire in the final stages of the fourth day, captured by TV cameras asking: "What the hell?" The same question must have gone through Pope's mind two hours previously - and last week, when Pat Cummins uprooted his off stump with a wicked yorker.

This was Starc at his best, coming up with a spell where nobody - not him, not his team-mates, and certainly not England's batters - seemed to know whether he was about to spray one down the leg side or rattle the stumps. Pace - or, as Starc calls it, "airspeed" - creates doubt; doubt causes chaos, and a batter's demise.

Few players convey the sense that this - white clothes, red ball, five days - really is the pinnacle in the way Starc does. The two other truly elite left-arm seamers, Trent Boult and Shaheen Shah Afridi, have not played a Test between them in the past 11 months. In this format, he is the best in the world at what he does.

Starc does not play in the IPL, or the Big Bash, or in any franchise leagues. He plays for Australia and can't get enough of it. "The money's nice," he said before this tour, "but I'd love to play 100 Test matches." Not many cricketers have the financial security to turn down the T20 money, but it is clear just how much this means to Starc.

This tour is legacy-defining for Starc. He had already ticked the white-ball World Cups off but since arriving in the UK, he has become a World Test Champion; now, he is bowling magic balls that will likely contribute to Australia taking a 2-0 lead in an away Ashes series. It doesn't get much better.