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The Australian batsman evenly coats butter on both sides of a slice of white bread. “That’s the secret,” he tells the camera as he brings down the lid of his sandwich grill. “Perfect. Then you get it crisp on the outside.” He checks inside to reveal a toasted delight of ideal crispiness, the melted cheese happily melting inside. “Here’s the key technique,” he announces. At which point, he does something shocking and odd.

Already, it’s clear a sense of disinterest is beginning to cover your eyes. The alarm bells of sportswriting pretension are blinking intensely. You’re likely conscious that Labuschagne hit 160 for his state team this week and is being feverishly talked up for an return to the Test side before the Ashes series.

You probably want to read more about his performance. But first – you now grasp with irritation – you’re going to have to sit through several lines of playful digression about toasted sandwiches, plus an additional unnecessary part of overly analytical commentary in the direct address. You feel resigned.

Labuschagne flips the sandwich on to a plate and walks across the fridge. “Not many people do this,” he announces, “but I actually like the grilled sandwich chilled. Done, in the fridge. You allow the cheese to set, head to practice, come back. Boom. Toastie’s ready to go.”

Back to Cricket

Alright, let’s try it like this. Let’s address the sports aspect initially? Little treat for reading until now. And while there may be just six weeks until the series opener, Labuschagne’s 100 runs against the Tasmanian side – his third this season in all formats – feels significantly impactful.

Here’s an Australia top three clearly missing form and structure, exposed by the Proteas in the WTC final, shown up once more in the Caribbean afterwards. Labuschagne was left out during that tour, but on some level you felt Australia were keen to restore him at the first opportunity. Now he appears to have given them the ideal reason.

This represents a approach the team should follow. Khawaja has just one 100 in his recent 44 batting efforts. Konstas looks hardly a Test opener and more like the good-looking star who might act as a batsman in a Indian film. Other candidates has shown convincing form. McSweeney looks cooked. Marcus Harris is still inexplicably hanging around, like moths or damp. Meanwhile their captain, Cummins, is hurt and suddenly this appears as a unusually thin squad, short of command or stability, the kind of effortless self-assurance that has often helped Australia dominate before a ball is bowled.

Marnus’s Comeback

Step forward Marnus: a top-ranked Test batsman as recently as 2023, just left out from the ODI side, the right person to restore order to a brittle empire. And we are told this is a calmer and more meditative Labuschagne now: a streamlined, fundamental-focused Labuschagne, less extremely focused with technical minutiae. “It seems I’ve really stripped it back,” he said after his century. “Not really too technical, just what I need to make runs.”

Naturally, few accept this. Most likely this is a fresh image that exists just in Labuschagne’s personal view: still constantly refining that approach from dawn to dusk, going more back to basics than anyone else would try. You want less technical? Marnus will take time in the training with trainers and footage, exhaustively remoulding himself into the least technical batter that has ever been seen. This is just the quality of the focused, and the quality that has long made Labuschagne one of the highly engaging cricketers in the sport.

The Broader Picture

Maybe before this very open historic rivalry, there is even a type of pleasing dissonance to Labuschagne’s unquenchable obsession. In England we have a squad for whom any kind of analysis, not to mention self-review, is a kind of dangerous taboo. Feel the flavours. Stay in the moment. Embrace the current.

For Australia you have a individual like Labuschagne, a player terminally obsessed with cricket and wonderfully unconcerned by public perception, who sees cricket even in the spaces between the cricket, who handles this unusual pursuit with precisely the amount of absurd reverence it demands.

And it worked. During his shamanic phase – from the instant he appeared to substitute for an injured the senior batsman at the famous ground in 2019 to until late 2022 – Labuschagne found a way to see the game on another level. To tap into it – through sheer intensity of will – on a higher, weirder, more frenzied level. During his days playing Kent league cricket, colleagues noticed him on the day of a match sitting on a park bench in a trance-like state, actually imagining each delivery of his time at the crease. As per cricket statisticians, during the first few years of his career a statistically unfathomable catches were spilled from his batting. Somehow Labuschagne had predicted events before others could react to affect it.

Form Issues

It’s possible this was why his performance dipped the point he became number one. 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 unable to move forward and seemed to misjudge his positioning. But it’s connected really. Meanwhile his coach, his coach, thinks a focus on white-ball cricket started to undermine belief in his alignment. Positive development: he’s recently omitted from the ODI side.

No doubt it’s important, too, that Labuschagne is a devoutly religious individual, an evangelical Christian who thinks that this is all preordained, who thus sees his task as one of reaching this optimal zone, however enigmatic and inexplicable it may seem to the mortal of us.

This mindset, to my mind, has always been the key distinction between him and Steve Smith, a instinctive player