Mitchell Starc's day of extremes in Cape Town

Mitchell Starc was struck for four boundaries off four consecutive deliveries in his seventh over on Tuesday. On the same day, Mitchell Starc picked up four wickets in the space of six deliveries across his 16th and 17th overs. And within those two remarkable Mitchell Starc-themed highlight reels lay the anatomy of the most ridiculous rollercoaster day in a Test series that has already felt like an amusement park of twists and turns.

One where South Africa went from being in a position so dominant that they looked certain to bat the visitors out of the Test to somehow finding a way to get dominated themselves and probably even let Australia walk away with the initiative.

For the world looked a lot different when Marques Ackerman was taking on the No.1 ranked Test bowler in the world and taking him down with disdain. The first and fourth boundaries of the sequence came via errant deliveries from Starc with a lot of width, which the aggressive left-hander slashed away for four. The two in the middle though summed up simply how things had gone for Australia during a torrid first session after Pat Cummins won the toss and chose to bowl first against all odds. An audacious clip over mid-wicket followed by a cheeky ramp through the slip region. So much so that even Ackerman couldn’t believe the execution as he walked down the pitch to his opening partner Aiden Markram with an expression that seemed to suggest, “I can’t believe I did that to Mitchell Starc”.

At the end of that Starc over, South Africa’s score read 125/0 in 25 overs. And if the left-arm fast bowler didn’t have steam coming out of his ears after Travis Head had dropped a sitter in the previous over, he seemed even more annoyed as he finished his 18-run over.

The pitchforks were out. The knives were being sharpened. And nobody was safe. Everyone starting from the captain to the coach, the selectors and anyone else that the axe could be aimed towards. The team management had been in the crossfire for a while now, with the call for heads having reached fever pitch last week after the embarrassing innings defeat in Gqeberha.

But as Ackerman and Markram continued to take the Australian bowlers down, especially in the way in which they continued to milk them for singles alongside the regular flow of boundaries, Australia was going to bed convinced that their Test team was in crisis. With Pat Cummins’ decision to field first on what looked for all money to be a pitch designed for making bulk runs, the final slip-up in what is considered a litany of missteps. The non-inclusion of Scott Boland and the bizarre late drop-out of Steve Smith didn’t help calm the waters of mistrust around the Test team down either.

South Africa were 140/0 at the lunch break, 158/0 when Ackerman finally got too clever for his own good against Nathan Lyon and 203/1 when Markram became the first victim to the short ball. This after they’d been seemingly gifted a free run on a relatively easy batting wicket for reasons largely unknown to anyone but Cummins, save the obvious suggestion of the batting line-up being too make-shift in nature.

By the time Starc returned for his clean-up act with the second new ball, Ryan Rickelton and Marco Jansen had played with great maturity and responsibility to drag the staggering South Africans back to a position of relative strength. Starc had in the middle of all this, bowled his 13th over where he took two wickets in the space of three deliveries, both off short deliveries, to land a double blow when the home team looked to salvage their sudden turn in command the first time around.

If you were playing Cluedo, it was Mitchell Starc with a new ball (of the second variety) in the blockhole. With a tinge of late in-swing. Rickelton fell first, trapped in front, before Jansen and Gerald Coetzee had their stumps blown away. Kagiso Rabada had no chance of keeping out a searing yorker.

There was symmetry in some ways with how the day started and how it ended. If South Africa’s charge in the first chapter was rapid and got the Newlands crowd buzzing and wanting more of the same from their own, Starc’s bulldozing spell near the finish ended the final chapter of the day equally rapidly leaving the home crowd in stunned silence and hoping for more of the same from their own on Wednesday.