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Marnus evenly coats butter on each surface of a slice of white bread. “That’s the key,” he states as he closes the lid of his grilled cheese press. “Boom. Then you get it crisp on each side.” He lifts the lid to reveal a toasted delight of ideal crispiness, the bubbling cheese happily melting inside. “Here’s the key technique,” he announces. At which point, he does something horrific and unspeakable.

At this stage, you may feel a sense of disinterest is beginning to form across your eyes. The warning signs of sportswriting pretension are flashing wildly. You’re no doubt informed that Labuschagne scored 160 for Queensland Bulls this week and is being feverishly talked up 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 sit through several lines of wobbling whimsy about toasted sandwiches, plus an further tangential section of overly analytical commentary in the “you” perspective. You groan once more.

Labuschagne flips the sandwich on to a serving plate and walks across the fridge. “It’s uncommon,” he announces, “but I genuinely enjoy the grilled sandwich chilled. Done, in the fridge. You allow the cheese to set, go bat, come back. Perfect. Sandwich is perfect.”

On-Field Matters

Okay, let’s try it like this. How about we cover the match details initially? Small reward for your patience. And while there may only be six weeks until the initial match, Labuschagne’s hundred against the Tigers – his third in recent months in all cricket – feels significantly impactful.

We have an Australia top three clearly missing consistency and technique, exposed by South Africa in the World Test Championship final, exposed again in the following Caribbean tour. 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 perfect excuse.

And this is a strategy Australia must implement. Usman Khawaja has just one 100 in his last 44 knocks. The young batsman looks hardly a first-innings batsman and more like the handsome actor who might portray a cricketer in a Bollywood epic. Other candidates has shown convincing form. One contender looks cooked. Another option is still oddly present, like dust or mold. Meanwhile their skipper, Cummins, is unfit and suddenly this appears as a weirdly lightweight side, lacking strength or equilibrium, the kind of effortless self-assurance that has often helped Australia dominate before a game starts.

Labuschagne’s Return

Here comes Labuschagne: a top-ranked Test batsman as just two years ago, recently omitted from the ODI side, the ideal candidate to return structure to a brittle empire. And we are informed this is a composed and reflective Labuschagne these days: a pared-down, back-to-basics Labuschagne, less maniacally obsessed with minor adjustments. “I believe I have really simplified things,” he said after his hundred. “Not really too technical, just what I need to score runs.”

Of course, nobody truly believes this. Most likely this is a new approach that exists just in Labuschagne’s personal view: still furiously stripping down that method from all day, going further toward simplicity than any player has attempted. You want less technical? Marnus will devote weeks in the training with advisors and replays, thoroughly reshaping his game into the simplest player that has ever played. That’s the nature of the addict, and the quality that has long made Labuschagne one of the deeply fascinating players in the cricket.

Bigger Scene

Perhaps before this highly uncertain England-Australia contest, there is even a kind of appealing difference to Labuschagne’s unquenchable obsession. For England we have a side for whom technical study, let alone self-analysis, is a forbidden topic. Trust your gut. Stay in the moment. Embrace the current.

For Australia you have a batsman like Labuschagne, a player terminally obsessed with the game and wonderfully unconcerned by public perception, who finds cricket even in the spaces between the cricket, who treats this absurd sport with precisely the amount of absurd reverence it deserves.

His method paid off. During his focused era – from the time he walked out to replace a concussed the senior batsman at Lord’s in 2019 to until late 2022 – Labuschagne found a way to see the game on another level. To access it – through pure determination – on a higher, weirder, more frenzied level. During his time with English county cricket, colleagues noticed him on the day of a match positioned on a seat in a focused mindset, literally visualising every single ball of his time at the crease. As per the analytics firm, during the first few years of his career a statistically unfathomable proportion of catches were dropped off his bat. In some way Labuschagne had intuited what would happen before anyone had a chance to change it.

Form Issues

Maybe this was why his performance dipped the moment he reached the summit. There were no worlds left to visualise, just a empty space before his eyes. Additionally – he began doubting his favorite stroke, got unable to move forward and seemed to forget where his off-stump was. But it’s part of the same issue. Meanwhile his mentor, Neil D’Costa, reckons a focus on white-ball cricket started to erode confidence in his technique. Good news: he’s recently omitted from the 50-over squad.

No doubt it’s important, too, that Labuschagne is a man of deep religious faith, an evangelical Christian who holds that this is all predetermined, who thus sees his role as one of accessing this state of flow, however enigmatic and inexplicable it may look to the mortal of us.

This, to my mind, has always been the primary contrast between him and the other batsman, a instinctive player