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Labuschagne evenly coats butter on each surface of a slice of plain bread. “That’s the secret,” he explains as he closes the lid of his toastie maker. “Perfect. Then you get it toasted on both sides.” He lifts the lid to reveal a golden square of delicious perfection, the bubbling cheese happily bubbling away. “And that’s the trick of the trade,” he declares. At which point, he does something horrific and unspeakable.

At this stage, I sense a sense of disinterest is beginning to form across your eyes. The red lights of sportswriting pretension are going off. You’re likely conscious that Labuschagne made 160 runs for his state team this week and is being feverishly talked up for an national team comeback before the Ashes.

You probably want to read more about cricket matters. But first – you now understand with frustration – you’re going to have to sit through several lines of light-hearted musing about toasted sandwiches, plus an extra unwanted bonus paragraph of self-referential analysis in the direct address. You groan once more.

He turns the sandwich on to a plate and heads over the fridge. “Not many people do this,” he remarks, “but I actually like the grilled sandwich chilled. Boom, in the fridge. You allow the cheese to set, go bat, come back. Boom. It’s ideal.”

The Cricket Context

Look, let’s try it like this. Shall we get the sports aspect out of the way first? Small reward for your patience. And while there may be just six weeks until the initial match, Labuschagne’s 100 runs against the Tigers – his third in recent months in all formats – feels importantly timed.

We have an Australian top order clearly missing form and structure, revealed against South Africa in the World Test Championship final, exposed again in the Caribbean afterwards. Labuschagne was omitted during that series, 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 ideal reason.

And this is a approach the team should follow. The opener has a single hundred in his recent 44 batting efforts. Konstas looks hardly a first-innings batsman and more like the good-looking star who might play a Test opener in a Bollywood movie. No other options has made a cogent case. Nathan McSweeney looks finished. Harris is still oddly present, like dust or mold. Meanwhile their captain, the pace bowler, is unfit and suddenly this appears as a unusually thin squad, short of command or stability, the kind of built-in belief that has often given Australia a lead before a match begins.

Marnus’s Comeback

Step forward Marnus: a leading Test player as recently as 2023, recently omitted from the one-day team, the right person to return structure to a shaky team. And we are told this is a composed and reflective Labuschagne now: a streamlined, fundamental-focused Labuschagne, not as extremely focused with minor adjustments. “I believe I have really stripped it back,” he said after his century. “Not really too technical, just what I must bat effectively.”

Naturally, nobody truly believes this. Most likely this is a rebrand that exists just in Labuschagne’s mind: still constantly refining that approach from dawn to dusk, going further toward simplicity than any player has attempted. Prefer simplicity? Marnus will devote weeks in the training with coaches and video clips, completely transforming into the least technical batter that has ever existed. This is simply the quality of the focused, and the quality that has always made Labuschagne one of the most wildly absorbing players in the game.

Wider Context

It could be before this inscrutably unpredictable historic rivalry, there is even a kind of interesting contrast to Labuschagne’s constant dedication. For England we have a team for whom any kind of analysis, especially personal critique, is a kind of dangerous taboo. Trust your gut. Be where the ball is. Live in the instant.

For Australia you have a player such as Labuschagne, a individual terminally obsessed with cricket and totally indifferent by public perception, who finds cricket even in the gaps in the game, who approaches this quirky game with just the right measure of odd devotion it demands.

This approach succeeded. During his shamanic phase – from the time he walked out to replace a concussed Smith 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 sheer intensity of will – on a elevated, strange, passionate tier. During his days playing club cricket, teammates would find him on the day of a match resting on a bench in a trance-like state, literally visualising each delivery of his batting stint. As per Cricviz, during the early stages of his career a surprisingly high number of chances were spilled from his batting. Somehow Labuschagne had predicted events before fielders could respond to affect it.

Current Struggles

It’s possible this was why his form started to decline the moment he reached the summit. There were no further goals to picture, just a empty space before his eyes. Additionally – he stopped trusting his cover drive, got unable to move forward and seemed to lose awareness of his stumps. But it’s connected really. Meanwhile his mentor, his coach, thinks a focus on white-ball cricket started to erode confidence in his positioning. Positive development: he’s now excluded from the 50-over squad.

No doubt it’s important, too, that Labuschagne is a strongly faithful person, an committed Christian who thinks that this is all basically written out in advance, who thus sees his task as one of achieving this peak performance, however enigmatic and inexplicable it may appear to the rest of us.

This, to my mind, has consistently been the primary contrast between him and the other batsman, a inherently talented player