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Labuschagne evenly coats butter on the top and bottom of a slice of soft bread. “That’s the key,” he explains as he brings down the lid of his sandwich grill. “Perfect. Then you get it crisp on the outside.” He opens the grill to reveal a perfectly browned of delicious perfection, the melted cheese happily sizzling within. “Here’s the secret method,” he explains. At which point, he does something horrific and unspeakable.

Already, you may feel a glaze of ennui is beginning to form across your eyes. The alarm bells of overly fancy prose are going off. You’re no doubt informed that Labuschagne scored 160 for his state team this week and is being feverishly talked up for an return to the Test side before the Ashes series.

You likely wish to read more about that. But first – you now grasp with irritation – you’re going to have to sit through several lines of playful digression about toasted sandwiches, plus an additional unnecessary part of tiresome meta‑deconstruction in the second person. You groan once more.

Labuschagne flips the sandwich on to a serving plate and heads over the fridge. “Not many people do this,” he remarks, “but I genuinely enjoy the toastie cold. There, in the fridge. You let the cheese firm up, go for a hit, come back. Alright. Sandwich is perfect.”

Back to Cricket

Look, here’s the main point. How about we cover the cricket bit out of the way first? Little treat for making it this far. And while there may be just six weeks until the series opener, Labuschagne’s hundred against Tasmania – his third this season in all cricket – feels significantly impactful.

We have an Aussie opening batsmen seriously lacking form and structure, exposed by South Africa in the Test championship decider, highlighted further in the following Caribbean tour. Labuschagne was left out during that tour, but on one hand you sensed Australia were desperate to rehabilitate him at the first opportunity. Now he appears to have given them the right opportunity.

Here is a strategy Australia must implement. The opener has a single hundred in his last 44 knocks. The young batsman looks not quite a first-innings batsman and closer to the good-looking star who might portray a cricketer in a Indian film. None of the alternatives has shown convincing form. McSweeney looks out of form. Marcus Harris is still surprisingly included, like moths or damp. Meanwhile their leader, the pace bowler, is unfit and suddenly this seems like a unusually thin squad, short of authority or balance, the kind of built-in belief that has often given Australia a lead before a ball is bowled.

Labuschagne’s Return

Enter Marnus: 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 informed this is a calmer and more meditative Labuschagne now: a simplified, no-frills Labuschagne, not as extremely focused with minor adjustments. “I believe I have really stripped it back,” he said after his ton. “Not really too technical, just what I need to score runs.”

Of course, few accept this. Probably this is a fresh image that exists only in Labuschagne’s personal view: still endlessly adjusting that technique from morning to night, going further toward simplicity than any player has attempted. Prefer simplicity? Marnus will spend months in the practice sessions with coaches and video clips, thoroughly reshaping his game into the least technical batter that has ever played. This is simply the quality of the focused, and the characteristic that has long made Labuschagne one of the most wildly absorbing sportsmen in the game.

The Broader Picture

Maybe before this very open Ashes series, there is even a kind of interesting contrast to Labuschagne’s endless focus. On England’s side we have a side for whom detailed examination, especially personal critique, is a forbidden topic. Feel the flavours. Stay in the moment. Embrace the current.

In the other corner you have a player such as Labuschagne, a player terminally obsessed with the sport and magnificently unbothered by who knows about it, who observes cricket even in the spaces between the cricket, who treats this absurd sport with precisely the amount of quirky respect it requires.

And it worked. During his intense period – from the time he walked out to substitute for an injured Smith at Lord’s Cricket Ground in 2019 to around the end of 2022 – Labuschagne found a way to see the game with greater insight. To tap into it – through sheer intensity of will – on a different, unusual, intense plane. During his time with club cricket, colleagues noticed him on the game day sitting on a park bench in a meditative condition, actually imagining every single ball of his batting stint. As per Cricviz, during the first few years of his career a surprisingly high proportion of catches were spilled from his batting. Remarkably Labuschagne had intuited what would happen before anyone had a chance to change it.

Current Struggles

Perhaps this was why his career began to disintegrate the point he became number one. There were no worlds left to visualise, just a boundless, uncharted void before his eyes. Additionally – he began doubting his cover drive, got stuck in his crease and seemed to forget where his off-stump was. But it’s connected really. Meanwhile his coach, Neil D’Costa, believes a emphasis on limited-overs started to weaken assurance in his alignment. Encouragingly: he’s just been dropped from the 50-over squad.

No doubt it’s important, too, that Labuschagne is a strongly faithful person, an religious believer who holds that this is all basically written out in advance, who thus sees his job as one of achieving this peak performance, however enigmatic and inexplicable it may seem to the ordinary people.

This approach, to my mind, has consistently been the main point of difference between him and the other batsman, a inherently talented player