Mitchell Starc takes Test bowling No. 1 after 10 wickets in Mackay

Mitchell Starc is the world’s top-ranked Test bowler for the first time. The ICC update on 26 August followed his 10-wicket match in the second Test against Bangladesh in Mackay, where he took 6 for 12 and 4 for 39 as Australia won by an innings and 51 runs inside two days.

Starc has 872 rating points. Jasprit Bumrah slips to second on 862. New Zealand’s Matt Henry is third on 861. Pat Cummins, who took 3 for 25 and 3 for 10 in the same match, moves up one place to fourth. Nathan Lyon enters the top 10 after three second-innings wickets.

The jump is two places. Starc had already reached second after last year’s Boxing Day Test. He had lived in the top 10 for most of a 15-year Test career. The last step waited until Mackay. He needed 22 balls for the 19th five-wicket haul of his career in the first innings, close to his own 15-ball record of 6 for 9 against West Indies in Jamaica last year.

The timing helped. Bumrah is missing India’s World Test Championship series against Sri Lanka. His latest spell at No. 1 lasted about two months. Across his career he has spent 697 days at the top, the most by an India bowler and the 14th-most by anyone. Starc did not need Bumrah to have a poor match. He needed a 10-wicket haul while the Indian was not adding points.

The longer stretch behind the ranking is sharper than one Test. Cricket Australia and AAP put Starc at 63 wickets at 17.33 in 11 Tests since last year’s World Test Championship final. He now sits 10th on the all-time Test wicket list with 445, having passed Dale Steyn’s 439 in Mackay. He is 36, 197 centimetres, and still bowling above 140 kph in opening spells.

Australia named him player of the series against Bangladesh. The next assignment is South Africa. Rankings move on match points, so a short tour can hand the spot back as quickly as Mackay took it. Bumrah’s rating will start to climb again once he bowls in a Test. Henry is one point behind Bumrah, which means a five-wicket haul in New Zealand colours could reorder the top three without Starc bowling a ball.

Starc’s career shape explains why the No. 1 tag arrived late. He has been used as a strike bowler across formats, with workload spikes at World Cups and Ashes series and rest in between. The last 15 months compressed that work into Tests. After the 2025 World Test Championship final he took 6 for 9 in Kingston, 7 for 58 on the opening day of the Ashes in Perth, and 6 for 75 in Brisbane. Those spells put him in the top three. Mackay finished the job.

For India the ranking is a marker, not a verdict on Bumrah. He first reached No. 1 in February 2024 and held the place for long stretches over two years. His absence from the Sri Lanka Tests is the gap Starc walked through. When both men are in the same cycle of matches, the points gap of 10 is small enough to flip in a single innings.

The table now reads Starc, Bumrah, Henry, Cummins. Lyon is back in the ten. Ollie Robinson made a large gain after eight wickets on his Test return. The next ICC update will tell whether Mackay was a peak or a plateau. Starc has the ranking he had not held in 107 Tests. He will have to bowl to keep it.