🔗 Share this article

Labuschagne carefully spreads butter on each surface of a slice of white bread. “That’s the secret,” he explains 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 perfectly browned of delicious perfection, the gooey cheese happily bubbling away. “So this is the key technique,” he announces. At which point, he does something shocking and odd.

At this stage, I sense a sense of disinterest is beginning to cover your eyes. The warning signs of elaborate writing are going off. You’re no doubt informed that Labuschagne hit 160 for Queensland this week and is being widely discussed for an Australian Test recall before the England-Australia contest.

You likely wish to read more about that. But first – you now grasp with irritation – you’re going to have to get through several lines of light-hearted musing about toasties, plus an extra unwanted bonus paragraph of self-referential analysis in the “you” perspective. You feel resigned.

He turns the sandwich on to a dish and heads over the fridge. “Not many people do this,” he announces, “but I genuinely enjoy the toastie cold. Boom, in the fridge. You get that cheese to harden up, go bat, come back. Boom. Sandwich is perfect.”

On-Field Matters

Look, let’s try it like this. Let’s address the sports aspect initially? Quick update for reading until now. And while there may only be six weeks until the first Test, Labuschagne’s century against the Tasmanian side – his third this season in various games – feels quietly decisive.

Here’s an Aussie opening batsmen badly short of form and structure, exposed by the Proteas in the World Test Championship final, highlighted further in the West Indies after that. Labuschagne was omitted during that trip, but on a certain level you sensed Australia were eager to bring him back at the first opportunity. Now he looks to have given them the right opportunity.

This represents a approach the team should follow. Khawaja has a single hundred in his past 44 innings. The young batsman looks less like a Test match opener and more like the good-looking star who might play a Test opener in a Bollywood epic. No other options has made a cogent case. Nathan McSweeney looks cooked. Harris is still surprisingly included, like unwanted guests. Meanwhile their skipper, the pace bowler, is unfit and suddenly this feels like a unusually thin squad, missing strength or equilibrium, the kind of natural confidence that has often helped Australia dominate before a ball is bowled.

Marnus’s Comeback

Enter Marnus: a leading Test player as recently as 2023, recently omitted from the 50-over squad, the right person to bring stability to a shaky team. And we are advised this is a composed and reflective Labuschagne currently: a simplified, no-frills Labuschagne, less maniacally obsessed with technical minutiae. “It seems I’ve really stripped it back,” he said after his century. “Less focused on technique, just what I should make runs.”

Clearly, nobody truly believes this. Probably this is a new approach that exists just in Labuschagne’s personal view: still endlessly adjusting that technique from dawn to dusk, going further toward simplicity than anyone else would try. Prefer simplicity? Marnus will take time in the practice sessions with trainers and footage, thoroughly reshaping his game into the least technical batter that has ever played. This is just the quality of the focused, and the trait that has long made Labuschagne one of the deeply fascinating cricketers in the sport.

The Broader Picture

Perhaps before this very open England-Australia contest, there is even a type of interesting contrast to Labuschagne’s unquenchable obsession. In England we have a squad for whom detailed examination, not to mention self-review, is a risky subject. Trust your gut. Stay in the moment. Live in the instant.

On the opposite side you have a individual like Labuschagne, a man completely dedicated with the game and magnificently unbothered by public perception, who finds cricket even in the spaces between the cricket, who approaches this quirky game with exactly the level of absurd reverence it deserves.

His method paid off. During his intense period – from the time he walked out to come in for a hurt Smith at Lord’s Cricket Ground in 2019 to until late 2022 – Labuschagne found a way to see the game more deeply. To reach it – through sheer intensity of will – on a higher, weirder, more frenzied level. During his stint in English county cricket, colleagues noticed him on the day of a match sitting on a park bench in a meditative condition, literally visualising each delivery of his innings. As per cricket statisticians, during the initial period of his career a unusually large proportion of catches were dropped off his bat. Remarkably Labuschagne had predicted events before anyone had a chance to change it.

Recent Challenges

Maybe this was why his form started to decline the time he achieved top ranking. There were no new heights to imagine, just a empty space before his eyes. Furthermore – he lost faith in 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, his coach, reckons a focus on white-ball cricket started to erode confidence in his technique. Encouragingly: he’s recently omitted from the 50-over squad.

Certainly it’s relevant, too, that Labuschagne is a man of deep religious faith, an evangelical Christian who believes that this is all basically written out in advance, who thus sees his role as one of accessing this state of flow, however enigmatic and inexplicable it may seem to the ordinary people.

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