How Starc found his mojo just days before Ashes opener

It took until just four days before one of the most dramatic starts to an Ashes series in recent memory for Mitchell Starc to rediscover top gear after almost three months of uncertainty.

Starc, who on Saturday won the Allan Border Medal as Australia's leading male cricketer of the past 12 months, began the Ashes summer with a wicket from his very first ball, setting the tone for arguably the best Test campaign of his decade-long career.

While that first-ball dismissal of Rory Burns at a packed Gabba on December 8 will long be remembered as the defining moment of the series, it was at a training session in Brisbane's inner north just days earlier that Starc finally found his rhythm again.

The left-armer had struggled with fluency in his run-up since mid-September following back-to-back quarantine stints that had restricted him to a hotel room for four weeks.

Having managed the issue during Australia's T20 World Cup campaign in the UAE, Starc revealed it wasn't until just days before the Ashes began that he finally felt back to his normal self.

"It got better towards the back end of the World Cup, but it probably wasn't until maybe the first or second session (back in Australia) ... where it felt a lot better," he said.

"It felt smoother, it felt natural.

"We had a couple of sessions out in the middle at Metricon (Stadium) ... where it felt good to go. And then we had that one session at Ian Healy Oval where it felt like it just clicked. The speed was up, I didn't have to think about where my feet were, and I could just worry about what I wanted to bowl.

"It's just part and parcel of the time we're in; there's going to be times where you need to adapt. And in this case, it was me trying to adapt to a run up that I'd somehow forgotten how to do.

"So it was nice that it came good prior to the Ashes. We can laugh about it now, but I'm glad we got there."

Having completed two weeks of mandatory hotel quarantine in Adelaide in August following Australia’s winter tours of the West Indies and Bangladesh, Starc volunteered for another two weeks almost immediately. With wife Alyssa Healy in quarantine in Queensland ahead of the women's team's series against

India, the left-armer joined her in order for them to spend some time together ahead of a busy summer schedule.

But the four weeks took a toll on his bowling, and it wasn't until after Australia's thumping loss to England at the World Cup – where Starc conceded 37 runs from just three overs – that his work with assistant coach Andrew McDonald started to pay off.

"I got out of quarantine and each week that went past bowling in the nets I thought, 'I'll find it next week, I'll find it next week'," he recalled.

"It got to the World Cup, we had a few days and I thought 'I'll find it, we'll be right'. But I couldn't find it.

"We had a four-day break after the England game where we had a couple of training sessions and … I worked with Andrew to just find something that I was comfortable with to attack the crease and not have to think so much about the run up. I could just think about where I wanted to bowl and what I wanted to do."