Mitchell Starc is running out of Shreyas Iyer's trust and the time to win it back

Nothing illustrates Mitchell Starc's situation at the Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) better than him readily walking towards his mark to bowl the 20th over against the Delhi Capitals (DC) on Monday and Shreyas Iyer giving it to Andre Russell instead.

Ignore his price tag for the time being. The 20th over in the first innings and the 19th over in the second essay are the most crucial in T20s and thus are usually the responsibility of the most experienced bowler in the team.

Starc fulfilled that for all three completed innings in KKR's first five games of the season. Even in the next, against the Rajasthan Royals (RR) on April 16, Shreyas used him for the 18th over of the chase in an aggressive attempt to close things off while keeping spinner Varun Chakravarthy free for the 20th over.

But the pattern took a big crack against the Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) on Sunday. Starc had gone for 36 runs in his first two. Shreyas gave him the 20th over of the chase, which is usually kept for the weakest link after exhausting all options to take wickets. And even 21 runs didn't seem enough for him as Karn Sharma's three sixes meant KKR could only somehow take a one-run win.

That was perhaps in the back of Shreyas' mind on Monday when Starc had already gone for 43 runs in his three overs at an economy rate of 14.33. The fact that no other teammate had conceded more than 7.25 runs/over till then was perhaps the last straw in the trust between the bowler and captain.

Mitchell Starc has lessons to learn from Vaibhav Arora and Harshit Rana

Despite his current form, Mitchell Starc is one of the best in the world. There's a reason why there aren't many left-arm pacers consistently clicking 145 kph in IPL 2024.

But that is not working at Eden Gardens. Here, like most other flat-ish tracks with short boundaries in IPL 2024, only the tiny bit of swing with the new ball and grip off the surface on slower ones have been the pacers' friends.

So far, Starc has been able to extract neither. On Monday, his entire first over felt like relentless trial-and-error to get the ball to swing in and york Prithvi Shaw and Jake Fraser-McGurk or seam-in sharply from a length to knock over their off-stump. But most of it was just errors and the DC openers easily managed to get 15 runs away.

Although Fraser-McGurk's got out to him miscuing a flick on a half-volley, Starc didn't ride the confidence and conceded 16 runs, including a horrific wide for a boundary, against DC's tailenders in the 16th over. It was similar to what happened against Karn. He kept failing to nail the yorkers. where the margin of error was negligible, and didn't try much else.

His one-dimensionalness and inability to switch plans contrast with his younger, Indian pace teammates Vaibhav Arora, 26, and Harshit Rana, 22.

Vaibhav's first ball on Monday was a no-ball against Fraser-McGurk. The free-hit could have set the tone for DC but he bowled a big booming in-swinger that the Australian youngster couldn't get under. He, too, was a bit lucky to get Shaw strangled down the leg, but the right-hander played his flick against the wrong line because the ball swung in more than he expected and took the edge to the keeper.

In his next over, Vaibhav conceded a boundary on a well-directed bouncer against Shai Hope but followed it up with a crackerjack away-nipper that clipped his off-stump bail. Both wicket-taking deliveries were bowled at around 135 clicks.

It's not like Vaibhav can't bowl 140-plus; he showed that in the game whenever he wanted to cramp the batters, but he kept his pace down to help himself swing it. As a result, among pacers to have bowled at least eight overs in powerplay in IPL 2024, Vaibhav has the best average -- 16.86 -- while Starc has the fifth worst -- 50.

Starc hasn't been able to extract a similar swing at the same venue despite trying to keep his pace down too. Perhaps it has something to do with his wrist.

"... When my arm dropped a bit and my wrist got a bit lazy, I couldn't swing the ball naturally," he had said to ESPN about learning more about his action in 2020. "But I could swing the ball reverse and I could get this power fade with the new ball."

Later that year, when he was back to his wicket-taking best, even Sachin Tendulkar noted something similar:

"Starc’s wrist position and shape on the ball is something that was missing for a while. The way he is now able to get the ball back in makes him a far more dangerous bowler," he wrote on X.

But again, that's not the only trick Vaibhav has. The third ball of the 10th over, he dug one in at just 122.9 kph -- one of his slowest deliveries -- against Rishabh Pant and the DC captain's big top-edge fell short of deep mid-wicket.

And the same plan has regularly worked for Harshit this season. Even on Monday, he got pasted for plenty by Abhishek Porel trying to bowl at over 140 kph in his first over. When he came for his second, though, he surprised Porel with a 118.2 kph cutter and the DC No. 3 missed the scoop to see his stumps castled.

Starc didn't even try one slower one on Monday. He has bowled fewer slower ones (five) in IPL 2024 than Harshit and Vaibhav did against DC alone.

“I’m not someone who comes out with 24 different types of slow balls, certainly for T20 cricket. I’ve got a bit of speed on my side and focus on obviously my death bowling rather than doing a lot of things okay,” The Indian Express quoted him saying earlier in his career in a recent article.

Harshit, on the other hand, has used that skill to excellent effect in death-overs in the season. Among pacers with at least five overs in this phase, he has the seventh-best economy rate of 10.33 while Starc has the second-worst at 16.80.

At the start of the season, KKR would not have expected Starc to be outperformed by their two uncapped Indian pacers. Mentor Gautam Gambhir at the time had defended his signing saying he was an "X-factor". And that's perhaps still true. We can't forget that he's carrying a small injury which kept him out of the last game.

But all in all, he is a magic-moments bowler who can create something out of nothing on his day and so far, there just hasn't been enough of those days. It's because of Harshit and Vaibhav's qualities that KKR have been able to carry him.

They might want to do that till the Qualifiers hoping that perhaps that'll bring out his best. But with Shreyas' trust in him at an all-time low, it feels like a gamble, an even bigger one than shelling out ₹24.75 crore on him in the first place.