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Labuschagne evenly coats butter on both sides of a slice of soft bread. “That’s the key,” he tells the camera as he brings down the lid of his sandwich grill. “There you go. Then you get it golden on both sides.” He opens the grill to reveal a perfectly browned of pure toasted goodness, the melted cheese happily bubbling away. “So this is the key technique,” he explains. At which point, he does something horrific and unspeakable.

By now, I sense a glaze of ennui is beginning to appear in your eyes. The warning signs of elaborate writing are blinking intensely. You’re likely conscious that Labuschagne hit 160 for his state team this week and is being widely discussed for an return to the Test side before the Ashes series.

You probably want to read more about cricket matters. But first – you now grasp with irritation – you’re going to have to get through a section of playful digression about toasties, plus an extra unwanted bonus paragraph of self-referential analysis in the second person. You sigh again.

He turns the sandwich on to a dish and heads over the fridge. “Few try this,” he announces, “but I genuinely enjoy the toastie cold. There, in the fridge. You get that cheese to harden up, go bat, come back. Boom. Sandwich is perfect.”

Back to Cricket

Alright, let’s try it like this. How about we cover the match details to begin with? Quick update for your patience. And while there may only be six weeks until the initial match, Labuschagne’s 100 runs against Tasmania – his third in recent months in all cricket – feels quietly decisive.

This is an Australian top order badly short of form and structure, shown up by the South African team in the Test championship decider, shown up once more in the Caribbean afterwards. Labuschagne was left out during that tour, but on one hand you gathered Australia were eager to bring him back at the first opportunity. Now he appears to have given them the right opportunity.

This represents a plan that Australia need to work. Khawaja has a single hundred in his past 44 innings. The young batsman looks not quite a first-innings batsman and closer to the attractive performer who might act as a batsman in a Indian film. Other candidates has made a cogent case. One contender looks out of form. Marcus Harris is still surprisingly included, like unwanted guests. Meanwhile their skipper, Pat Cummins, is injured and suddenly this feels like a surprisingly weak team, missing authority or balance, 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 in the recent past, just left out from the ODI side, the perfect character to return structure to a shaky team. And we are advised this is a more relaxed and thoughtful Labuschagne these days: a pared-down, no-frills Labuschagne, less extremely focused with technical minutiae. “It seems I’ve really simplified things,” he said after his century. “Less focused on technique, just what I need to bat effectively.”

Of course, nobody truly believes this. In all likelihood this is a rebrand that exists just in Labuschagne’s mind: still endlessly adjusting that approach from all day, going further toward simplicity than any player has attempted. You want less technical? Marnus will spend months in the nets with coaches and video clips, exhaustively remoulding himself into the most basic batsman that has ever played. This is just the quality of the focused, and the characteristic that has consistently made Labuschagne one of the highly engaging players in the sport.

Bigger Scene

It could be before this very open England-Australia contest, there is even a type of interesting contrast to Labuschagne’s endless focus. For England we have a side for whom technical study, especially personal critique, is a forbidden topic. Trust your gut. Be where the ball is. Embrace the current.

For Australia you have a player such as Labuschagne, a man terminally obsessed with the sport and wonderfully unconcerned by who knows about it, who finds cricket even in the spaces between the cricket, who approaches this quirky game with exactly the level of absurd reverence it demands.

His method paid off. During his shamanic phase – from the time he walked out to replace a concussed Steve Smith at Lord’s Cricket Ground in 2019 to through 2022 – Labuschagne somehow managed to see the game on another level. To access it – through sheer intensity of will – on a elevated, strange, passionate tier. During his time with club cricket, teammates would find him on the day of a match resting on a bench in a meditative condition, literally visualising every single ball of his batting stint. Per Cricviz, during the first few years of his career a statistically unfathomable proportion of catches were spilled from his batting. Remarkably Labuschagne had anticipated outcomes before fielders could respond to influence it.

Recent Challenges

Perhaps this was why his form started to decline the moment he reached the summit. There were no worlds left to visualise, just a unknown territory before his eyes. Furthermore – he lost faith in his signature shot, got trapped on the crease and seemed to misjudge his positioning. But it’s part of the same issue. Meanwhile his coach, Neil D’Costa, believes a attention to shorter formats started to undermine belief in his technique. Good news: he’s now excluded from the 50-over squad.

Certainly it’s relevant, too, that Labuschagne is a devoutly religious individual, an committed Christian who believes that this is all preordained, who thus sees his job as one of accessing this state of flow, despite being puzzling it may appear to the rest of us.

This mindset, to my mind, has long been the main point of difference between him and Steve Smith, a inherently talented player