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Marnus carefully spreads butter on the top and bottom of a slice of soft bread. “That’s the key,” he states as he closes the lid of his sandwich grill. “Boom. Then you get it toasted on the outside.” He opens the grill to reveal a perfectly browned of pure toasted goodness, the bubbling cheese happily bubbling away. “So this is the secret method,” he explains. At which point, he does something unexpected and strange.

Already, you may feel a glaze of ennui is beginning to form across your eyes. The red lights of overly fancy prose are blinking intensely. You’re no doubt informed that Labuschagne made 160 runs for his state team this week and is being eagerly promoted for an return to the Test side before the Ashes series.

No doubt you’d prefer to read more about cricket matters. But first – you now realise with an anguished sigh – you’re going to have to endure a section of light-hearted musing about toasted sandwiches, plus an extra unwanted bonus paragraph of overly analytical commentary in the second person. You groan once more.

Marnus transfers the sandwich on to a dish and walks across the fridge. “It’s uncommon,” he remarks, “but I personally prefer the toastie cold. Boom, in the fridge. You let the cheese firm up, head to practice, come back. Boom. It’s ideal.”

Back to Cricket

Look, to cut to the chase. Shall we get the match details initially? Quick update for your patience. And while there may still be six weeks until the series opener, Labuschagne’s hundred against the Tasmanian side – his third of the summer in all cricket – feels quietly decisive.

We have an Australia top three clearly missing consistency and technique, revealed against the Proteas in the World Test Championship final, exposed again in the West Indies after that. Labuschagne was left out during that tour, but on some level you felt Australia were eager to bring him back at the first opportunity. Now he seems to have given them the ideal reason.

And this is a plan that Australia need to work. Khawaja has one century in his recent 44 batting efforts. Konstas looks less like a first-innings batsman 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. One contender looks finished. Harris is still oddly present, like unwanted guests. Meanwhile their captain, Pat Cummins, is unfit and suddenly this seems like a surprisingly weak team, short of authority or balance, the kind of natural confidence that has often put Australia 2-0 up before a match begins.

Marnus’s Comeback

Here comes Labuschagne: a leading Test player as in the recent past, just left out from the one-day team, the right person to return structure to a brittle empire. And we are told this is a calmer and more meditative Labuschagne currently: a pared-down, no-frills Labuschagne, not as maniacally obsessed with small details. “I believe I have really cut out extras,” he said after his century. “Not really too technical, just what I must make runs.”

Naturally, this is doubted. Probably this is a rebrand that exists just in Labuschagne’s own head: still furiously stripping down that technique from all day, going further toward simplicity than any player has attempted. Prefer simplicity? Marnus will spend months in the nets with trainers and footage, exhaustively remoulding himself into the simplest player that has ever been seen. That’s the nature of the addict, and the trait that has consistently made Labuschagne one of the highly engaging players in the cricket.

Wider Context

It could be before this highly uncertain Ashes series, there is even a sort of pleasing dissonance to Labuschagne’s unquenchable obsession. For England we have a team for whom technical study, especially personal critique, is a risky subject. Feel the flavours. Be where the ball is. Embrace the current.

For Australia you have a batsman like Labuschagne, a individual terminally obsessed with the sport and wonderfully unconcerned by who knows about it, who finds cricket even in the moments outside play, who handles this unusual pursuit with exactly the level of absurd reverence it deserves.

His method paid off. During his shamanic phase – from the instant he appeared to come in for a hurt Smith at Lord’s in 2019 to through 2022 – Labuschagne found a way to see the game on another level. To tap into it – through pure determination – on a different, unusual, intense plane. During his stint in club cricket, teammates would find him on the day of a match resting on a bench in a meditative condition, actually imagining all balls of his batting stint. According to Cricviz, during the first few years of his career a unusually large number of chances were missed when he batted. In some way Labuschagne had intuited what would happen before anyone had a chance to influence it.

Recent Challenges

Perhaps 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. Additionally – he began doubting his cover drive, got unable to move forward and seemed to misjudge his positioning. But it’s part of the same issue. Meanwhile his trainer, his coach, reckons a focus on white-ball cricket started to erode confidence in his technique. Positive development: he’s recently omitted from the one-day team.

Certainly it’s relevant, too, that Labuschagne is a devoutly religious individual, an committed Christian who holds 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 consistently been the main point of difference between him and the other batsman, a inherently talented player