🔗 Share this article

Labuschagne methodically applies butter on both sides of a slice of plain bread. “That’s the secret,” he tells the camera as he lowers the lid of his toastie maker. “Boom. Then you get it toasted on the outside.” He opens the grill to reveal a golden square of pure toasted goodness, the bubbling cheese happily sizzling within. “And that’s the trick of the trade,” he explains. At which point, he does something shocking and odd.

By now, it’s clear a glaze of ennui is beginning to cover your eyes. The alarm bells of sportswriting pretension are blinking intensely. You’re no doubt informed that Labuschagne made 160 runs for Queensland this week and is being eagerly promoted for an Australian Test recall before the England-Australia contest.

You likely wish to read more about cricket matters. But first – you now grasp with irritation – you’re going to have to get through three paragraphs of light-hearted musing about toasties, plus an extra unwanted bonus paragraph of overly analytical commentary in the second person. You feel resigned.

He turns the sandwich on to a plate and heads over the fridge. “It’s uncommon,” he remarks, “but I genuinely enjoy the cold toastie. Done, in the fridge. You let the cheese firm up, head to practice, come back. Perfect. Toastie’s ready to go.”

On-Field Matters

Alright, let’s try it like this. How about we cover the sports aspect out of the way first? Little treat for reading until now. And while there may still be six weeks until the initial match, Labuschagne’s hundred against the Tasmanian side – his third in recent months in all cricket – feels significantly impactful.

This is an Australian top order badly short of performance and method, shown up by the South African team in the World Test Championship final, shown up once more in the Caribbean afterwards. Labuschagne was left out during that trip, but on a certain level you gathered Australia were desperate to rehabilitate him at the first opportunity. Now he seems to have given them the right opportunity.

This represents a approach the team should follow. Khawaja has a single hundred in his last 44 knocks. Sam Konstas looks hardly a Test match opener and more like the good-looking star who might portray a cricketer in a Indian film. None of the alternatives has presented a strong argument. Nathan McSweeney looks out of form. Harris is still inexplicably hanging around, like moths or damp. Meanwhile their skipper, Cummins, is injured and suddenly this appears as a surprisingly weak team, lacking strength or equilibrium, the kind of built-in belief that has often given Australia a lead before a ball is bowled.

Labuschagne’s Return

Enter Marnus: a world No 1 Test batter as just two years ago, just left out from the one-day team, the perfect character to restore order to a brittle empire. And we are told this is a more relaxed and thoughtful Labuschagne currently: a simplified, back-to-basics Labuschagne, not as extremely focused with technical minutiae. “I feel like I’ve really stripped it back,” he said after his century. “Not really too technical, just what I should make runs.”

Naturally, this is doubted. Most likely this is a new approach that exists entirely in Labuschagne’s mind: still endlessly adjusting that approach from dawn to dusk, going further toward simplicity than anyone else would try. Prefer simplicity? Marnus will spend months in the nets with coaches and video clips, thoroughly reshaping his game into the most basic batsman that has ever been seen. This is simply the quality of the focused, and the quality that has always made Labuschagne one of the deeply fascinating cricketers in the cricket.

Wider Context

It could be before this very open historic rivalry, there is even a kind of pleasing dissonance to Labuschagne’s constant dedication. On England’s side we have a side for whom technical study, let alone self-analysis, is a risky subject. Feel the flavours. Focus on the present. Embrace the current.

For Australia you have a individual like Labuschagne, a individual utterly absorbed with the game and magnificently unbothered by public perception, who finds cricket even in the spaces between the cricket, who approaches this quirky game with just the right measure of quirky respect it demands.

This approach succeeded. During his shamanic phase – from the time he walked out to come in for a hurt Steve Smith at Lord’s Cricket Ground in 2019 to until late 2022 – Labuschagne was able to see the game on another level. To tap into it – through pure determination – on a higher, weirder, more frenzied level. During his days playing Kent league cricket, fellow players saw him on the morning of a game sitting on a park bench in a meditative condition, literally visualising each delivery of his innings. According to cricket statisticians, during the first few years of his career a statistically unfathomable catches were missed when he batted. Somehow Labuschagne had predicted events before anyone had a chance to influence it.

Current Struggles

Maybe this was why his career began to disintegrate the time he achieved top ranking. There were no worlds left to visualise, just a boundless, uncharted void before his eyes. Additionally – he began doubting his cover drive, got trapped on the crease and seemed to lose awareness of his stumps. But it’s connected really. Meanwhile his mentor, D’Costa, thinks a emphasis on limited-overs started to erode confidence in his positioning. Encouragingly: he’s just been dropped from the 50-over squad.

Surely it matters, too, that Labuschagne is a man of deep religious faith, an evangelical Christian who believes that this is all basically written out in advance, who thus sees his task as one of achieving this peak performance, no matter how mysterious it may look to the ordinary people.

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