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Labuschagne carefully spreads butter on the top and bottom of a slice of plain bread. “That’s essential,” he explains as he lowers the lid of his toastie maker. “There you go. Then you get it crisp on each side.” He checks inside to reveal a toasted delight of pure toasted goodness, the gooey cheese happily melting inside. “And that’s the key technique,” he announces. At which point, he does something horrific and unspeakable.

By now, I sense a sense of disinterest is beginning to appear in your eyes. The alarm bells of overly fancy prose are going off. You’re probably aware that Labuschagne scored 160 for Queensland Bulls this week and is being widely discussed for an national team comeback before the Ashes series.

You probably want to read more about that. But first – you now understand with frustration – you’re going to have to endure several lines of wobbling whimsy about toasted sandwiches, plus an additional unnecessary part of overly analytical commentary in the second person. You sigh again.

Marnus transfers the sandwich on to a plate and walks across the fridge. “Few try this,” he states, “but I personally prefer the cold toastie. There, in the fridge. You let the cheese firm up, head to practice, come back. Alright. Sandwich is perfect.”

Back to Cricket

Alright, here’s the main point. How about we cover the match details initially? Little treat for your patience. And while there may still be six weeks until the first Test, Labuschagne’s hundred against Tasmania – his third in recent months in all cricket – feels importantly timed.

We have an Australia top three badly short of consistency and technique, revealed against the South African team in the World Test Championship final, highlighted further in the Caribbean afterwards. Labuschagne was omitted during that trip, but on one hand you sensed Australia were desperate to rehabilitate him at the earliest chance. Now he seems to have given them the ideal reason.

This represents a plan that Australia need to work. Usman Khawaja has one century in his recent 44 batting efforts. The young batsman looks less like a Test opener and rather like the good-looking star who might portray a cricketer in a Indian film. Other candidates has shown convincing form. Nathan McSweeney looks cooked. Marcus Harris is still inexplicably hanging around, like dust or mold. Meanwhile their skipper, Cummins, is unfit and suddenly this seems like a weirdly lightweight side, missing command or stability, the kind of built-in belief that has often helped Australia dominate before a match begins.

Marnus’s Comeback

Here comes Labuschagne: a top-ranked Test batsman as in the recent past, recently omitted from the one-day team, the ideal candidate to bring stability to a brittle empire. And we are told this is a more relaxed and thoughtful Labuschagne currently: a simplified, no-frills Labuschagne, no longer as maniacally obsessed with minor adjustments. “It seems I’ve really stripped it back,” he said after his hundred. “Not really too technical, just what I must score runs.”

Clearly, nobody truly believes this. Most likely this is a fresh image that exists only in Labuschagne’s mind: still furiously stripping down that approach from dawn to dusk, going deeper into fundamentals than anyone has ever dared. You want less technical? Marnus will devote weeks in the nets with coaches and video clips, thoroughly reshaping his game into the simplest player that has ever played. This is just the trait of the obsessed, and the trait that has always made Labuschagne one of the highly engaging sportsmen in the sport.

Wider Context

Maybe before this very open historic rivalry, there is even a type of interesting contrast to Labuschagne’s endless focus. On England’s side we have a squad for whom technical study, not to mention self-review, is a forbidden topic. Go with instinct. Be where the ball is. Embrace the current.

For Australia you have a batsman like Labuschagne, a man terminally obsessed with the sport and magnificently unbothered by public perception, who finds cricket even in the spaces between the cricket, who approaches this quirky game with precisely the amount of odd devotion it deserves.

And it worked. During his shamanic phase – from the time he walked out to come in for a hurt Steve Smith at Lord’s Cricket Ground in 2019 to until late 2022 – Labuschagne found a way to see the game on another level. To tap into it – through sheer intensity of will – on a different, unusual, intense plane. During his stint in club cricket, fellow players saw him on the game day positioned on a seat in a focused mindset, actually imagining each delivery of his batting stint. According to cricket statisticians, during the first few years of his career a unusually large proportion of catches were dropped off his bat. Somehow Labuschagne had intuited what would happen before fielders could respond to affect it.

Recent Challenges

Perhaps this was why his form started to decline the point he became number one. There were no new heights to imagine, just a boundless, uncharted void before his eyes. Additionally – he lost faith in his signature shot, got trapped on the crease and seemed to forget where his off-stump was. But it’s part of the same issue. Meanwhile his trainer, D’Costa, reckons a emphasis on limited-overs started to erode confidence in his alignment. Positive development: he’s now excluded from the one-day team.

Certainly it’s relevant, too, that Labuschagne is a man of deep religious faith, an religious believer who believes that this is all preordained, who thus sees his role as one of reaching this optimal zone, no matter how mysterious it may seem to the ordinary people.

This mindset, to my mind, has always been the main point of difference between him and the other batsman, a more naturally gifted player