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Labuschagne carefully spreads butter on each surface of a slice of plain bread. “That’s essential,” he tells the camera as he lowers the lid of his sandwich grill. “There you go. Then you get it crisp on each side.” He opens the grill to reveal a golden square of ideal crispiness, the melted cheese happily melting inside. “So this is the trick of the trade,” he explains. At which point, he does something horrific and unspeakable.

At this stage, I sense a glaze of ennui is beginning to cover your eyes. The warning signs of elaborate writing are going off. You’re probably aware that Labuschagne scored 160 for Queensland Bulls this week and is being feverishly talked up for an return to the Test side before the England-Australia contest.

You likely wish to read more about cricket matters. But first – you now grasp with irritation – you’re going to have to get through three paragraphs of playful digression about toasted sandwiches, plus an further tangential section of overly analytical commentary in the second person. You feel resigned.

Labuschagne flips the sandwich on to a dish and walks across the fridge. “Not many people do this,” he announces, “but I personally prefer the toastie cold. There, in the fridge. You get that cheese to harden up, go for a hit, come back. Alright. It’s ideal.”

On-Field Matters

Okay, to cut to the chase. Shall we get the cricket bit to begin with? Little treat for reading until now. And while there may be just six weeks until the first Test, Labuschagne’s century against the Tigers – his third of the summer in various games – feels significantly impactful.

We have an Australian top order badly short of consistency and technique, exposed by South Africa in the Test championship decider, exposed again in the Caribbean afterwards. Labuschagne was left out during that tour, but on a certain level you gathered Australia were keen to restore him at the earliest chance. Now he appears to have given them the perfect excuse.

Here is a approach the team should follow. Usman Khawaja has just one 100 in his last 44 knocks. Sam Konstas looks less like a Test opener and closer to the good-looking star who might act as a batsman in a Bollywood epic. No other options has made a cogent case. One contender looks out of form. Harris is still inexplicably hanging around, like moths or damp. Meanwhile their skipper, Cummins, is injured and suddenly this feels like a weirdly lightweight side, lacking authority or balance, the kind of effortless self-assurance that has often helped Australia dominate before a match begins.

The Batsman’s Revival

Enter Marnus: a world No 1 Test batter as just two years ago, freshly dropped from the 50-over squad, the right person to restore order to a shaky team. And we are told this is a more relaxed and thoughtful Labuschagne currently: a pared-down, fundamental-focused Labuschagne, less intensely fixated with small details. “It seems I’ve really cut out extras,” he said after his ton. “Less focused on technique, just what I must score runs.”

Naturally, nobody truly believes this. Most likely this is a new approach that exists just in Labuschagne’s personal view: still constantly refining that method from all day, going further toward simplicity than any player has attempted. Prefer simplicity? Marnus will spend months in the nets with advisors and replays, thoroughly reshaping his game into the least technical batter that has ever played. That’s the nature of the addict, and the quality that has consistently made Labuschagne one of the highly engaging cricketers in the sport.

Wider Context

It could be before this inscrutably unpredictable historic rivalry, there is even a sort of pleasing dissonance to Labuschagne’s unquenchable obsession. In England we have a team for whom technical study, not to mention self-review, is a forbidden topic. Trust your gut. Focus on the present. Smell the now.

For Australia you have a player such as Labuschagne, a individual terminally obsessed with the sport and totally indifferent by public perception, who sees cricket even in the spaces between the cricket, who treats this absurd sport with precisely the amount of quirky respect it deserves.

His method paid off. During his focused era – from the instant he appeared to come in for a hurt the senior batsman at Lord’s in 2019 to until late 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 time with club cricket, fellow players saw him on the day of a match sitting on a park bench in a trance-like state, mentally rehearsing each delivery of his time at the crease. As per cricket statisticians, during the early stages of his career a unusually large number of chances were missed when he batted. Remarkably Labuschagne had anticipated outcomes before others could react to change it.

Current Struggles

Perhaps this was why his performance dipped the moment he reached the summit. There were no further goals to picture, just a unknown territory before his eyes. Additionally – he began doubting his favorite stroke, got trapped on the crease and seemed to misjudge his positioning. But it’s all the same thing. Meanwhile his mentor, his coach, thinks a attention to shorter formats started to weaken assurance in his positioning. Encouragingly: he’s now excluded from the one-day team.

Certainly it’s relevant, too, that Labuschagne is a man of deep religious faith, an evangelical Christian who believes that this is all preordained, who thus sees his task as one of achieving this peak performance, however enigmatic and inexplicable it may appear to the mortal of us.

This approach, to my mind, has consistently been the primary contrast between him and Steve Smith, a more naturally gifted player