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Marnus evenly coats butter on both sides of a slice of white bread. “That’s the key,” he tells the camera as he closes the lid of his sandwich grill. “Boom. Then you get it golden on both sides.” He opens the grill to reveal a perfectly browned of pure toasted goodness, the melted cheese happily melting inside. “Here’s the secret method,” he explains. At which point, he does something horrific and unspeakable.

At this stage, I sense a glaze of ennui is beginning to form across your eyes. The red lights of sportswriting pretension are flashing wildly. You’re likely conscious that Labuschagne made 160 runs for his state team this week and is being widely discussed for an national team comeback before the Ashes series.

You likely wish to read more about cricket matters. But first – you now realise with an anguished sigh – you’re going to have to sit through a section of wobbling whimsy about grilled cheese, plus an further tangential section of tiresome meta‑deconstruction in the “you” perspective. You feel resigned.

He turns the sandwich on to a serving plate and moves toward the fridge. “Few try this,” he announces, “but I genuinely enjoy the toastie cold. Done, in the fridge. You allow the cheese to set, go for a hit, come back. Alright. It’s ideal.”

Back to Cricket

Look, here’s the main point. Shall we get the match details out of the way first? Little treat for your patience. And while there may only be six weeks until the series opener, Labuschagne’s hundred against Tasmania – his third this season in all cricket – feels importantly timed.

We have an Australian top order badly short of performance and method, shown up by the South African team in the WTC final, shown up once more in the Caribbean afterwards. Labuschagne was dropped during that trip, but on a certain level you felt Australia were desperate to rehabilitate him at the earliest chance. Now he looks to have given them the perfect excuse.

This represents a strategy Australia must implement. Usman Khawaja has one century in his last 44 knocks. The young batsman looks less like a first-innings batsman and closer to the good-looking star who might portray a cricketer in a Bollywood movie. None of the alternatives has made a cogent case. Nathan McSweeney looks finished. Another option is still inexplicably hanging around, like unwanted guests. Meanwhile their skipper, the pace bowler, is injured and suddenly this seems like a unusually thin squad, missing command or stability, the kind of built-in belief that has often given Australia a lead before a game starts.

Marnus’s Comeback

Here comes Labuschagne: a top-ranked Test batsman as just two years ago, recently omitted from the 50-over squad, the right person to restore order to a brittle empire. And we are advised this is a more relaxed and thoughtful Labuschagne now: a pared-down, fundamental-focused Labuschagne, not as maniacally obsessed with technical minutiae. “It seems I’ve really stripped it back,” he said after his ton. “Less focused on technique, just what I should make runs.”

Of course, few accept this. In all likelihood this is a fresh image that exists only in Labuschagne’s personal view: still endlessly adjusting that technique from dawn to dusk, going further toward simplicity than anyone else would try. You want less technical? Marnus will spend months in the training with coaches and video clips, exhaustively remoulding himself into the least technical batter that has ever existed. This is simply the trait of the obsessed, and the quality that has consistently made Labuschagne one of the deeply fascinating sportsmen in the cricket.

Bigger Scene

It could be before this inscrutably unpredictable England-Australia contest, there is even a kind of interesting contrast to Labuschagne’s unquenchable obsession. In England we have a squad for whom detailed examination, especially personal critique, is a kind of dangerous taboo. Go with instinct. Be where the ball is. Smell the now.

In the other corner you have a batsman like Labuschagne, a individual utterly absorbed with the sport and totally indifferent by who knows about it, who finds cricket even in the moments outside play, who approaches this quirky game with precisely the amount of absurd reverence it demands.

And it worked. During his intense period – from the instant he appeared to substitute for an injured Smith at Lord’s in 2019 to until late 2022 – Labuschagne somehow managed to see the game on another level. To reach it – through sheer intensity of will – on a higher, weirder, more frenzied level. During his stint in club cricket, colleagues noticed him on the day of a match resting on a bench in a trance-like state, mentally rehearsing each delivery of his time at the crease. According to cricket statisticians, during the first few years of his career a surprisingly high catches were dropped off his bat. In some way Labuschagne had intuited what would happen before fielders could respond to change it.

Recent Challenges

It’s possible this was why his career began to disintegrate the moment he reached the summit. There were no worlds left to visualise, just a empty space before his eyes. Furthermore – he lost faith in his signature shot, got unable to move forward and seemed to lose awareness of his stumps. But it’s connected really. Meanwhile his mentor, Neil D’Costa, reckons a focus on white-ball cricket started to undermine belief in his technique. Positive development: 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 committed Christian who believes that this is all preordained, who thus sees his task 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 long been the key distinction between him and Smith, a instinctive player