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Marnus methodically applies butter on each surface of a slice of plain bread. “That’s the key,” he states as he closes the lid of his sandwich grill. “There you go. Then you get it toasted on the outside.” He checks inside to reveal a golden square of delicious perfection, the melted cheese happily sizzling within. “So this is the secret method,” he announces. At which point, he does something horrific and unspeakable.

By now, it’s clear a layer of boredom is beginning to form across your eyes. The alarm bells of sportswriting pretension are flashing wildly. You’re probably aware that Labuschagne scored 160 for Queensland this week and is being eagerly promoted for an national team comeback before the Ashes.

You probably want to read more about cricket matters. But first – you now realise with an anguished sigh – you’re going to have to get through three paragraphs of light-hearted musing about grilled cheese, plus an extra unwanted bonus paragraph of tiresome meta‑deconstruction in the “you” perspective. You feel resigned.

He turns the sandwich on to a plate and walks across the fridge. “Few try this,” he states, “but I genuinely enjoy the cold toastie. Done, in the fridge. You let the cheese firm up, go for a hit, come back. Boom. Sandwich is perfect.”

The Cricket Context

Okay, here’s the main point. How about we cover the cricket bit initially? Quick update for reading until now. And while there may be just six weeks until the series opener, Labuschagne’s 100 runs 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, revealed against South Africa in the Test championship decider, exposed again in the following Caribbean tour. Labuschagne was dropped during that series, but on one hand you gathered Australia were eager to bring him back at the soonest moment. Now he seems to have given them the perfect excuse.

This represents a plan that Australia need to work. The opener has a single hundred in his recent 44 batting efforts. The young batsman looks hardly a first-innings batsman and rather like the good-looking star who might portray a cricketer in a Indian film. No other options has made a cogent case. Nathan McSweeney looks finished. Another option is still inexplicably hanging around, like dust or mold. Meanwhile their captain, Pat Cummins, is unfit and suddenly this appears as a unusually thin squad, missing command or stability, the kind of built-in belief that has often given Australia a lead before a game starts.

The Batsman’s Revival

Enter Marnus: a world No 1 Test batter as in the recent past, freshly dropped from the one-day team, the right person to bring stability to a brittle empire. And we are told this is a composed and reflective Labuschagne these days: a pared-down, no-frills Labuschagne, no longer as intensely fixated with technical minutiae. “I believe I have really simplified things,” he said after his century. “Not overthinking, just what I must bat effectively.”

Naturally, this is doubted. Probably this is a new approach that exists only in Labuschagne’s personal view: still constantly refining that technique from morning to night, going more back to basics than anyone else would try. You want less technical? Marnus will devote weeks in the nets with coaches and video clips, thoroughly reshaping his game into the least technical batter that has ever played. That’s the quality of the focused, and the characteristic that has long made Labuschagne one of the deeply fascinating players in the game.

The Broader Picture

Perhaps before this inscrutably unpredictable Ashes series, there is even a type of appealing difference to Labuschagne’s endless focus. For England we have a team for whom detailed examination, not to mention self-review, is a risky subject. Go with instinct. Be where the ball is. Live in the instant.

In the other corner you have a batsman like Labuschagne, a individual completely dedicated with the game and magnificently unbothered by who knows about it, who finds cricket even in the spaces between the cricket, who approaches this quirky game with precisely the amount of odd devotion it deserves.

This approach succeeded. During his shamanic phase – from the moment he strode out to replace a concussed the senior batsman at Lord’s in 2019 to through 2022 – Labuschagne somehow managed to see the game more deeply. To access it – through absolute focus – on a higher, weirder, more frenzied level. During his stint in Kent league cricket, fellow players saw him on the morning of a game sitting on a park bench in a meditative condition, literally visualising every single ball of his batting stint. According to Cricviz, during the initial period of his career a surprisingly high proportion of catches were missed when he batted. In some way Labuschagne had intuited what would happen before fielders could respond to influence it.

Current Struggles

Maybe this was why his performance dipped the time he achieved top ranking. There were no further goals to picture, just a empty space before his eyes. Also – to be fair – he lost faith in his favorite stroke, got stuck in his crease and seemed to forget where his off-stump was. But it’s connected really. Meanwhile his mentor, Neil D’Costa, thinks a attention to shorter formats started to weaken assurance in his technique. Encouragingly: he’s just been dropped from the one-day team.

Surely it matters, too, that Labuschagne is a strongly faithful person, an evangelical Christian who holds that this is all preordained, who thus sees his role as one of accessing this state of flow, no matter how mysterious it may seem to the rest of us.

This, to my mind, has always been the key distinction between him and Smith, a inherently talented player