🔗 Share this article

The Australian batsman carefully spreads butter on the top and bottom of a slice of plain bread. “That’s the secret,” he states as he lowers the lid of his toastie maker. “Perfect. Then you get it toasted on the outside.” He lifts the lid to reveal a golden square of pure toasted goodness, the gooey cheese happily melting inside. “So this is the trick of the trade,” he announces. At which point, he does something unexpected and strange.

At this stage, you may feel a sense of disinterest is beginning to form across your eyes. The red lights of elaborate writing are blinking intensely. You’re likely conscious that Labuschagne made 160 runs for Queensland this week and is being feverishly talked up for an Australian Test recall before the England-Australia contest.

You probably want to read more about his performance. But first – you now realise with an anguished sigh – you’re going to have to get through a section of playful digression about grilled cheese, plus an further tangential section of tiresome meta‑deconstruction in the “you” perspective. You sigh again.

Labuschagne flips the sandwich on to a serving plate and walks across the fridge. “Not many people do this,” he states, “but I genuinely enjoy the cold toastie. Done, in the fridge. You get that cheese to harden up, go for a hit, come back. Alright. Sandwich is perfect.”

On-Field Matters

Alright, here’s the main point. How about we cover the cricket bit to begin with? Small reward for reading until now. And while there may only be six weeks until the series opener, Labuschagne’s century against the Tasmanian side – his third of the summer in all formats – feels quietly decisive.

Here’s an Australian top order badly short of consistency and technique, revealed against the Proteas in the Test championship decider, shown up once more in the following Caribbean tour. Labuschagne was omitted during that trip, but on one hand you gathered Australia were desperate to rehabilitate him at the first opportunity. Now he looks to have given them the ideal reason.

And this is a plan that Australia need to work. Khawaja has just one 100 in his recent 44 batting efforts. The young batsman looks not quite a first-innings batsman and closer to the handsome actor who might play a Test opener in a Indian film. Other candidates has shown convincing form. McSweeney looks cooked. Marcus Harris is still oddly present, like moths or damp. Meanwhile their skipper, the pace bowler, is unfit and suddenly this appears as a unusually thin squad, short of command or stability, the kind of natural confidence that has often given Australia a lead before a ball is bowled.

Labuschagne’s Return

Step forward Marnus: a top-ranked Test batsman as just two years ago, freshly dropped from the ODI side, the perfect character to return structure to a fragile lineup. And we are advised this is a calmer and more meditative Labuschagne now: a streamlined, back-to-basics Labuschagne, less extremely focused with small details. “It seems I’ve really simplified things,” he said after his ton. “Not really too technical, just what I need to bat effectively.”

Naturally, nobody truly believes this. In all likelihood this is a new approach that exists entirely in Labuschagne’s own head: still constantly refining that method from morning to night, going further toward simplicity than anyone has ever dared. Prefer simplicity? Marnus will spend months in the training with coaches and video clips, exhaustively remoulding himself into the most basic batsman that has ever played. This is simply the trait of the obsessed, and the trait that has consistently made Labuschagne one of the most wildly absorbing players in the sport.

The Broader Picture

It could be before this highly uncertain historic rivalry, there is even a kind of appealing difference to Labuschagne’s constant dedication. For England we have a squad for whom detailed examination, not to mention self-review, is a kind of dangerous taboo. Feel the flavours. Stay in the moment. Embrace the current.

In the other corner you have a individual like Labuschagne, a player terminally obsessed with the game and magnificently unbothered by who knows about it, who finds cricket even in the moments outside play, who approaches this quirky game with just the right measure of absurd reverence it deserves.

His method paid off. During his focused era – from the instant he appeared to come in for a hurt Steve Smith at the famous ground in 2019 to around the end of 2022 – Labuschagne was able to see the game more deeply. To access it – through absolute focus – on a different, unusual, intense plane. During his time with Kent league cricket, teammates would find him on the morning of a game resting on a bench in a meditative condition, literally visualising all balls of his time at the crease. As per the analytics firm, during the initial period of his career a statistically unfathomable number of chances were missed when he batted. Somehow Labuschagne had predicted events before others could react to change it.

Current Struggles

Maybe this was why his form started to decline the time he achieved top ranking. There were no worlds left to visualise, just a empty space before his eyes. Also – to be fair – he lost faith in his favorite stroke, got trapped on the crease and seemed to forget where his off-stump was. But it’s all the same thing. Meanwhile his coach, his coach, believes a attention to shorter formats started to erode confidence in his technique. Encouragingly: he’s now excluded from the one-day team.

Surely it matters, too, that Labuschagne is a strongly faithful person, an religious believer who holds that this is all basically written out in advance, who thus sees his role as one of accessing this state of flow, however enigmatic and inexplicable it may seem to the ordinary people.

This mindset, to my mind, has consistently been the primary contrast between him and Smith, a instinctive player