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Labuschagne evenly coats butter on the top and bottom of a slice of white bread. “That’s the secret,” he tells the camera as he lowers the lid of his sandwich grill. “Boom. Then you get it golden on each side.” He opens the grill to reveal a toasted delight of delicious perfection, the bubbling cheese happily bubbling away. “So this is the key technique,” he explains. At which point, he does something shocking and odd.

By now, you may feel a glaze of ennui is beginning to form across your eyes. The red lights of elaborate writing are flashing wildly. You’re no doubt informed that Labuschagne scored 160 for his state team this week and is being widely discussed for an Australian Test recall before the Ashes series.

No doubt you’d prefer to read more about his performance. But first – you now realise with an anguished sigh – you’re going to have to endure three paragraphs of playful digression about grilled cheese, plus an further tangential section of overly analytical commentary in the second person. You sigh again.

He turns the sandwich on to a dish and walks across the fridge. “Few try this,” he states, “but I actually like the grilled sandwich chilled. Done, in the fridge. You get that cheese to harden up, go bat, come back. Perfect. Sandwich is perfect.”

The Cricket Context

Look, here’s the main point. Let’s address the sports aspect initially? Small reward for making it this far. And while there may be just six weeks until the series opener, Labuschagne’s century against Tasmania – his third of the summer in various games – feels quietly decisive.

We have an Australia top three badly short of form and structure, shown up by South Africa in the World Test Championship final, shown up once more in the West Indies after that. Labuschagne was omitted during that tour, but on one hand you felt Australia were eager to bring him back at the soonest moment. Now he seems to have given them the perfect excuse.

Here is a plan that Australia need to work. Usman Khawaja has just one 100 in his last 44 knocks. Sam Konstas looks less like a Test opener and rather like the attractive performer who might portray a cricketer in a Bollywood epic. None of the alternatives has shown convincing form. McSweeney looks cooked. Harris is still oddly present, like dust or mold. Meanwhile their leader, Cummins, is unfit and suddenly this seems like a surprisingly weak team, missing command or stability, the kind of built-in belief that has often put Australia 2-0 up before a ball is bowled.

The Batsman’s Revival

Step forward Marnus: a top-ranked Test batsman as recently as 2023, freshly dropped from the one-day team, the perfect character to return structure to a shaky team. And we are informed this is a calmer and more meditative Labuschagne these days: a simplified, back-to-basics Labuschagne, no longer as extremely focused with technical minutiae. “It seems I’ve really cut out extras,” he said after his hundred. “Less focused on technique, just what I need to score runs.”

Of course, nobody truly believes this. Most likely this is a fresh image that exists just in Labuschagne’s mind: still endlessly adjusting that method from dawn to dusk, going more back to basics than anyone else would try. You want less technical? Marnus will spend months in the practice sessions with coaches and video clips, completely transforming into the most basic batsman that has ever played. This is simply the nature of the addict, and the quality that has long made Labuschagne one of the highly engaging players in the cricket.

The Broader Picture

It could be before this inscrutably unpredictable Ashes series, there is even a sort of interesting contrast to Labuschagne’s unquenchable obsession. In England we have a team for whom any kind of analysis, let alone self-analysis, is a risky subject. Go with instinct. Stay in the moment. Live in the instant.

In the other corner you have a batsman like Labuschagne, a individual terminally obsessed with the game and magnificently unbothered by public perception, who observes cricket even in the gaps in the game, who treats this absurd sport with exactly the level of quirky respect it deserves.

His method paid off. During his shamanic phase – from the time he walked out to come in for a hurt Smith at Lord’s in 2019 to through 2022 – Labuschagne somehow managed to see the game more deeply. To tap into it – through sheer intensity of will – on a elevated, strange, passionate tier. During his stint in club cricket, fellow players saw him on the morning of a game sitting on a park bench in a focused mindset, literally visualising each delivery of his batting stint. Per cricket statisticians, during the initial period of his career a statistically unfathomable number of chances were dropped off his bat. Somehow Labuschagne had intuited what would happen before anyone had a chance to influence 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 empty space before his eyes. Also – to be fair – he stopped trusting his favorite stroke, got trapped on the crease and seemed to forget where his off-stump was. But it’s part of the same issue. Meanwhile his coach, D’Costa, reckons a emphasis on limited-overs started to weaken assurance in his technique. Encouragingly: he’s now excluded from the ODI side.

Certainly it’s relevant, too, that Labuschagne is a strongly faithful person, an evangelical Christian who holds that this is all predetermined, who thus sees his role as one of achieving this peak performance, however enigmatic and inexplicable it may seem to the mortal of us.

This approach, to my mind, has consistently been the key distinction between him and Steve Smith, a instinctive player