Amid his first couple of international games,against India in Vizag and Sri Lanka in Melbourne,Starc was given a hard lesson in terms of how to handle his body.
As a newcomer to international cricket,he was honestly reporting to the team physio exactly how he was feeling. Every niggling pain here and there was duly and faithfully passed onto the team coach,Tim Nielsen.
“It would’ve been my first or second tour and I was still learning what all those pains were,” Starc said in Christchurch. “Obviously the reports get around from physios to coaches and I sort of got told to ‘harden the eff up’ a little bit.
“Timmy Nielsen probably made me aware of that early doors and I think there’s times where you need to be honest with the medical staff,but other times you’ve got to know when to push through a few things. I was still learning how to bowl and what my body was telling me.
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“I was still going through all those developing pains and my body adapting to things,and it was sort of,‘Your name’s always down as this is sore,that’s sore,whatever’s sore,there’s good pain and bad pain,you don’t always have to[report it]’. That pushed me along to working that out a bit quicker and not having to say when everything was sore,pretty much.”
Brett Lee commented later that same season about how figuring out the difference between general stiffness and a more pointed problem was a bridge that Starc’s generation needed to cross.