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Marnus carefully spreads butter on each surface of a slice of white bread. “That’s the key,” he tells the camera as he closes the lid of his sandwich grill. “There you go. Then you get it crisp on both sides.” He checks inside to reveal a toasted delight of pure toasted goodness, the melted cheese happily melting inside. “So this is the trick of the trade,” he declares. At which point, he does something unexpected and strange.

By now, I sense a glaze of ennui is beginning to appear in your eyes. The warning signs of sportswriting pretension are going off. You’re no doubt informed that Labuschagne made 160 runs for his state team this week and is being widely discussed for an return to the Test side before the Ashes.

No doubt you’d prefer to read more about that. But first – you now understand with frustration – you’re going to have to sit through three paragraphs of wobbling whimsy about toasties, plus an extra unwanted bonus paragraph of self-referential analysis in the “you” perspective. You groan once more.

Marnus transfers the sandwich on to a serving plate and moves toward the fridge. “Not many people do this,” he announces, “but I personally prefer the grilled sandwich chilled. There, in the fridge. You allow the cheese to set, go bat, come back. Alright. Sandwich is perfect.”

The Cricket Context

Okay, here’s the main point. Let’s address the cricket bit out of the way first? Little treat for making it this far. And while there may still be six weeks until the initial match, Labuschagne’s century against Tasmania – his third in recent months in all formats – feels quietly decisive.

We have an Australia top three seriously lacking form and structure, shown up by the South African team in the Test championship decider, highlighted further in the Caribbean afterwards. Labuschagne was omitted during that tour, but on some level you sensed Australia were desperate to rehabilitate him at the earliest chance. Now he seems to have given them the perfect excuse.

This represents a approach the team should follow. The opener has a single hundred in his past 44 innings. Konstas looks less like a Test opener and closer to the handsome actor who might act as a batsman in a Bollywood movie. Other candidates has made a cogent case. McSweeney looks out of form. Another option is still inexplicably hanging around, like moths or damp. Meanwhile their skipper, Cummins, is unfit and suddenly this appears as a surprisingly weak team, missing authority or balance, the kind of natural confidence that has often helped Australia dominate before a game starts.

The Batsman’s Revival

Step forward Marnus: a world No 1 Test batter as recently as 2023, recently omitted from the one-day team, the right person to restore order to a shaky team. And we are advised this is a more relaxed and thoughtful Labuschagne currently: a pared-down, back-to-basics Labuschagne, less intensely fixated with technical minutiae. “I believe I have really stripped it back,” he said after his hundred. “Not overthinking, just what I must score runs.”

Of course, few accept this. Most likely this is a fresh image that exists just in Labuschagne’s personal view: still endlessly adjusting that technique from morning to night, going further toward simplicity than any player has attempted. You want less technical? Marnus will spend months in the training with coaches and video clips, exhaustively remoulding himself into the least technical batter that has ever existed. That’s the trait of the obsessed, and the trait that has long made Labuschagne one of the deeply fascinating players in the sport.

The Broader Picture

It could be before this inscrutably unpredictable Ashes series, there is even a sort of interesting contrast to Labuschagne’s unquenchable obsession. In England we have a team for whom technical study, let alone self-analysis, is a risky subject. Trust your gut. Be where the ball is. Smell the now.

For Australia you have a individual like Labuschagne, a player utterly absorbed with cricket and magnificently unbothered by others’ opinions, who finds cricket even in the gaps in the game, who treats this absurd sport with precisely the amount of absurd reverence it demands.

His method paid off. During his shamanic phase – from the time he walked out to come in for a hurt the senior batsman at Lord’s Cricket Ground in 2019 to until late 2022 – Labuschagne somehow managed to see the game more deeply. To tap into it – through absolute focus – on a different, unusual, intense plane. During his days playing English county cricket, colleagues noticed him on the morning of a game positioned on a seat in a trance-like state, mentally rehearsing all balls of his time at the crease. Per cricket statisticians, during the initial period of his career a unusually large catches were spilled from his batting. Remarkably Labuschagne had predicted events before others could react to affect it.

Current Struggles

Perhaps this was why his career began to disintegrate the moment he reached the summit. There were no worlds left to visualise, just a boundless, uncharted void before his eyes. Additionally – he stopped trusting his favorite stroke, got trapped on the crease and seemed to misjudge his positioning. But it’s part of the same issue. Meanwhile his coach, his coach, thinks a focus on white-ball cricket started to erode confidence in his positioning. Good news: he’s now excluded from the ODI side.

No doubt it’s important, too, that Labuschagne is a strongly faithful person, an committed Christian who holds that this is all preordained, who thus sees his task as one of accessing this state of flow, however enigmatic and inexplicable it may seem to the rest of us.

This, to my mind, has consistently been the key distinction between him and Smith, a more naturally gifted player