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Starc admits to being underdone for Perth Test
- Updated: October 31, 2016
Mitchell Starc’s leg wound is still open. He will require a special knee pad to be able to dive in the field. And he is more than 10 days behind where he would prefer to be in preparation for the first Test of the summer, against South Africa in Perth – the match all Cricket Australia’s intricate preparatory plans are meant to be geared for.
That’s the challenging scenario for the man who has swiftly become Australia’s most valuable cricketing asset. His pace and swing are capable of unpicking the lock to a South African batting line-up that toyed with Steven Smith’s team on the recent ODI tour in Starc’s absence.
For that reason, there is no question of Starc missing out on a match that will set the tone for the home season, and a series against opponents who will test the resolve of the hosts to perform in familiar climes after humiliations in Sri Lanka and South Africa. The training-inflicted gash to the leg that Starc is still recovering from mirrors the sense that this is an Australian side yet to take complete form after 2015’s raft of retirements.
“It’s still open, clean it every day, put a patch on it and away you go,” Starc said of his left leg. “It’s still a little bit opened, so it’s probably going to take a couple of weeks [to heal]. It’s not bleeding, it’s healing nicely. It’s all clean. I think when I started bowling and running again it just sort of stretched the skin a little bit. It’s not a bad thing, it needed to stretch anyway. But it probably just delayed the healing a little bit.
“[Without the injury] I would have obviously played a couple of Matador games and played the full Shield game as well. So I’m probably – hard to say, probably a week or week-and-a-half behind where I would have liked to be. Being in a brace for four weeks – I couldn’t sweat on the wound, so I couldn’t run or do all of the gym sessions I wanted to do. So I was a fair bit behind at the start and tried to catch up at the end.
“I’m still a little bit behind where I would have liked but …
