🔗 Share this article

Marnus evenly coats butter on the top and bottom of a slice of plain bread. “That’s essential,” he explains as he lowers the lid of his grilled cheese press. “There you go. Then you get it toasted on the outside.” He lifts the lid to reveal a toasted delight of ideal crispiness, the gooey cheese happily melting inside. “So this is the key technique,” he explains. At which point, he does something unexpected and strange.

By now, you may feel a glaze of ennui is beginning to cover your eyes. The alarm bells of sportswriting pretension are flashing wildly. You’re probably aware that Labuschagne scored 160 for Queensland Bulls this week and is being eagerly promoted for an return to the Test side before the Ashes.

You likely wish to read more about cricket matters. But first – you now understand with frustration – you’re going to have to endure a section of playful digression about grilled cheese, plus an additional unnecessary part of self-referential analysis in the second person. You sigh again.

He turns the sandwich on to a dish and moves toward the fridge. “Few try this,” he remarks, “but I genuinely enjoy the cold toastie. There, in the fridge. You let the cheese firm up, go for a hit, come back. Boom. Sandwich is perfect.”

On-Field Matters

Look, let’s try it like this. Let’s address 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 century against Tasmania – his third in recent months in all cricket – feels significantly impactful.

Here’s an Australia top three badly short of consistency and technique, shown up by South Africa in the World Test Championship final, highlighted further in the following Caribbean tour. Labuschagne was dropped during that trip, but on a certain level you sensed Australia were eager to bring him back at the soonest moment. Now he looks to have given them the ideal reason.

And this is a approach the team should follow. Usman Khawaja has a single hundred in his recent 44 batting efforts. The young batsman looks less like a Test opener and closer to the good-looking star who might portray a cricketer in a Bollywood epic. None of the alternatives has made a cogent case. Nathan McSweeney looks cooked. Marcus Harris is still inexplicably hanging around, like moths or damp. Meanwhile their leader, Cummins, is injured and suddenly this seems like a surprisingly weak team, lacking command or stability, the kind of built-in belief that has often given Australia a lead before a game starts.

Marnus’s Comeback

Here comes Labuschagne: a leading Test player as recently as 2023, just left out from the 50-over squad, the perfect character to restore order to a shaky team. And we are advised this is a calmer and more meditative Labuschagne currently: a streamlined, fundamental-focused Labuschagne, less maniacally obsessed with technical minutiae. “It seems I’ve really simplified things,” he said after his hundred. “Less focused on technique, just what I need to score runs.”

Naturally, nobody truly believes this. Probably this is a rebrand that exists entirely in Labuschagne’s personal view: still endlessly adjusting that method from dawn to dusk, going more back to basics than anyone has ever dared. Prefer simplicity? Marnus will devote weeks in the training with advisors and replays, exhaustively remoulding himself into the most basic batsman that has ever played. This is just the nature of the addict, and the characteristic that has consistently made Labuschagne one of the deeply fascinating players in the game.

Wider Context

It could be before this inscrutably unpredictable England-Australia contest, there is even a sort of interesting contrast to Labuschagne’s unquenchable obsession. For England we have a side for whom technical study, especially personal critique, is a forbidden topic. Go with instinct. Focus on the present. Smell the now.

For Australia you have a batsman like Labuschagne, a individual terminally obsessed with the game and magnificently unbothered by who knows about it, who observes cricket even in the spaces between the cricket, who approaches this quirky game with just the right measure of odd devotion it requires.

And it worked. During his focused era – from the time he walked out to come in for a hurt Smith at the famous ground in 2019 to until late 2022 – Labuschagne somehow managed to see the game on another level. To access it – through sheer intensity of will – on a higher, weirder, more frenzied level. During his stint in Kent league cricket, teammates would find him on the day of a match sitting on a park bench in a trance-like state, literally visualising every single ball of his batting stint. According to cricket statisticians, during the initial period of his career a unusually large proportion of catches were missed when he batted. Remarkably Labuschagne had predicted events before anyone had a chance to change it.

Recent Challenges

It’s possible this was why his form started to decline the point he became number one. There were no further goals to picture, just a boundless, uncharted void before his eyes. Additionally – he lost faith in his signature shot, got stuck in his crease and seemed to forget where his off-stump was. But it’s part of the same issue. Meanwhile his trainer, Neil D’Costa, thinks a emphasis on limited-overs started to erode confidence in his positioning. Positive development: 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 predetermined, who thus sees his task as one of achieving this peak performance, 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 more naturally gifted player