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Labuschagne carefully spreads butter on each surface of a slice of soft bread. “That’s the key,” he states as he closes the lid of his sandwich grill. “There you go. Then you get it toasted on the outside.” He checks inside to reveal a perfectly browned of pure toasted goodness, the melted cheese happily melting inside. “Here’s the key technique,” he announces. At which point, he does something shocking and odd.

Already, you may feel a layer of boredom is beginning to appear in your eyes. The red lights of sportswriting pretension are blinking intensely. You’re likely conscious that Labuschagne scored 160 for his state team this week and is being eagerly promoted for an return to the Test side before the Ashes.

You likely wish to read more about cricket matters. But first – you now understand with frustration – you’re going to have to sit through several lines of wobbling whimsy about grilled cheese, plus an extra unwanted bonus paragraph of self-referential analysis in the second person. You groan once more.

Marnus transfers the sandwich on to a plate and walks across the fridge. “It’s uncommon,” he remarks, “but I personally prefer the grilled sandwich chilled. There, in the fridge. You get that cheese to harden up, go for a hit, come back. Boom. It’s ideal.”

Back to Cricket

Look, to cut to the chase. Let’s address the cricket bit to begin with? Small reward for your patience. And while there may still be six weeks until the first Test, Labuschagne’s century against the Tigers – his third of the summer in all formats – feels quietly decisive.

This is an Australia top three badly short of consistency and technique, exposed by the South African team in the World Test Championship final, exposed again in the Caribbean afterwards. Labuschagne was left out during that series, but on a certain level you gathered Australia were desperate to rehabilitate him at the first opportunity. Now he appears to have given them the perfect excuse.

Here is a approach the team should follow. The opener has one century in his recent 44 batting efforts. The young batsman looks not quite a Test opener and more like the attractive performer who might act as a batsman in a Bollywood movie. No other options has presented a strong argument. One contender looks out of form. Marcus Harris is still inexplicably hanging around, like dust or mold. Meanwhile their skipper, Pat Cummins, is hurt and suddenly this seems like a weirdly lightweight side, short of strength or equilibrium, the kind of natural confidence that has often helped Australia dominate before a ball is bowled.

Labuschagne’s Return

Here comes Labuschagne: a leading Test player as in the recent past, recently omitted from the ODI side, the ideal candidate to restore order to a fragile lineup. And we are told this is a more relaxed and thoughtful Labuschagne currently: a streamlined, back-to-basics Labuschagne, less maniacally obsessed with technical minutiae. “It seems I’ve really stripped it back,” he said after his ton. “Not overthinking, just what I should make runs.”

Clearly, nobody truly believes this. Probably this is a fresh image that exists just in Labuschagne’s own head: still endlessly adjusting that technique from morning to night, going further toward simplicity than anyone else would try. Prefer simplicity? Marnus will devote weeks in the practice sessions with trainers and footage, exhaustively remoulding himself into the simplest player that has ever existed. This is just the trait of the obsessed, and the characteristic that has consistently made Labuschagne one of the deeply fascinating sportsmen in the cricket.

The Broader Picture

Maybe before this inscrutably unpredictable historic rivalry, there is even a type of appealing difference to Labuschagne’s endless focus. For England we have a squad for whom technical study, not to mention self-review, is a kind of dangerous taboo. Go with instinct. Stay in the moment. Smell the now.

For Australia you have a batsman like Labuschagne, a player terminally obsessed with the game and totally indifferent by public perception, who sees cricket even in the moments outside play, who approaches this quirky game with exactly the level of odd devotion it demands.

His method paid off. During his intense period – from the instant he appeared to replace a concussed the senior batsman at Lord’s Cricket Ground in 2019 to around the end of 2022 – Labuschagne found a way to see the game more deeply. To access it – through absolute focus – on a different, unusual, intense plane. During his days playing Kent league cricket, fellow players saw him on the day of a match positioned on a seat in a trance-like state, actually imagining all balls of his batting stint. According to Cricviz, during the initial period of his career a statistically unfathomable number of chances were dropped off his bat. Somehow Labuschagne had predicted events before fielders could respond to change it.

Current Struggles

Maybe this was why his form started to decline the moment he reached the summit. There were no worlds left to visualise, just a empty space before his eyes. Also – to be fair – he began doubting his favorite stroke, got unable to move forward and seemed to forget where his off-stump was. But it’s connected really. Meanwhile his coach, Neil D’Costa, believes a focus on white-ball cricket started to erode confidence in his technique. Encouragingly: he’s recently omitted from the one-day team.

No doubt it’s important, too, that Labuschagne is a strongly faithful person, an religious believer who holds that this is all preordained, who thus sees his task as one of achieving this peak performance, however enigmatic and inexplicable it may seem to the mortal of us.

This, to my mind, has consistently been the key distinction between him and the other batsman, a more naturally gifted player