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Marnus carefully spreads butter on each surface of a slice of white bread. “That’s essential,” he explains as he lowers the lid of his toastie maker. “Perfect. Then you get it crisp on each side.” He checks inside to reveal a golden square of ideal crispiness, the gooey cheese happily melting inside. “And that’s the secret method,” he declares. At which point, he does something horrific and unspeakable.

By now, you may feel a layer of boredom is beginning to cover your eyes. The alarm bells of overly fancy prose are blinking intensely. You’re likely conscious that Labuschagne hit 160 for his state team this week and is being eagerly promoted for an national team comeback before the Ashes series.

No doubt you’d prefer to read more about that. But first – you now understand with frustration – you’re going to have to get through several lines of light-hearted musing about grilled cheese, plus an additional unnecessary part of self-referential analysis in the direct address. You sigh again.

Labuschagne flips the sandwich on to a plate and moves toward the fridge. “It’s uncommon,” he states, “but I genuinely enjoy the toastie cold. Boom, in the fridge. You get that cheese to harden up, head to practice, come back. Alright. It’s ideal.”

On-Field Matters

Look, let’s try it like this. Shall we get the match details initially? Little treat for your patience. And while there may be just six weeks until the first Test, Labuschagne’s hundred against Tasmania – his third of the summer in all cricket – feels significantly impactful.

Here’s an Australia top three badly short of performance and method, shown up by the Proteas in the World Test Championship final, exposed again in the West Indies after that. Labuschagne was left out during that series, but on one hand you felt Australia were desperate to rehabilitate him at the earliest chance. Now he looks to have given them the ideal reason.

This represents a strategy Australia must implement. Khawaja has just one 100 in his last 44 knocks. The young batsman looks less like a first-innings batsman and more like the handsome actor who might act as a batsman in a Bollywood epic. Other candidates has shown convincing form. McSweeney looks out of form. Harris is still surprisingly included, like moths or damp. Meanwhile their captain, Cummins, is injured and suddenly this appears as a surprisingly weak team, lacking authority or balance, the kind of built-in belief that has often helped Australia dominate before a match begins.

Marnus’s Comeback

Here comes Labuschagne: a top-ranked Test batsman as in the recent past, freshly dropped from the ODI side, the perfect character to restore order to a brittle empire. And we are advised this is a calmer and more meditative Labuschagne now: a streamlined, back-to-basics Labuschagne, less intensely fixated with technical minutiae. “I believe I have really stripped it back,” he said after his century. “Less focused on technique, just what I need to bat effectively.”

Of course, nobody truly believes this. Probably this is a fresh image that exists only in Labuschagne’s own head: still constantly refining that method from all day, going deeper into fundamentals than any player has attempted. You want less technical? Marnus will take time in the training with advisors and replays, exhaustively remoulding himself into the simplest player that has ever been seen. This is simply the quality of the focused, and the quality that has always made Labuschagne one of the deeply fascinating players in the cricket.

Bigger Scene

It could be before this highly uncertain Ashes series, there is even a kind of pleasing dissonance to Labuschagne’s unquenchable obsession. On England’s side we have a team for whom technical study, especially personal critique, is a kind of dangerous taboo. Go with instinct. Stay in the moment. Smell the now.

For Australia you have a player such as Labuschagne, a man terminally obsessed with the sport and magnificently unbothered by public perception, who sees cricket even in the gaps in the game, who approaches this quirky game with precisely the amount of quirky respect it requires.

This approach succeeded. During his intense period – from the instant he appeared to substitute for an injured Smith at Lord’s Cricket Ground in 2019 to until late 2022 – Labuschagne was able to see the game on another level. To reach it – through absolute focus – on a higher, weirder, more frenzied level. During his days playing Kent league cricket, fellow players saw him on the game day positioned on a seat in a trance-like state, actually imagining each delivery of his batting stint. Per Cricviz, during the early stages of his career a surprisingly high catches were dropped off his bat. Somehow Labuschagne had intuited what would happen before anyone had a chance to influence it.

Form Issues

Maybe this was why his career began to disintegrate the point he became number one. There were no new heights to imagine, just a empty space before his eyes. Also – to be fair – he lost faith in his signature shot, got stuck in his crease and seemed to lose awareness of his stumps. But it’s connected really. Meanwhile his coach, Neil D’Costa, reckons a focus on white-ball cricket started to weaken assurance in his positioning. Good news: he’s now excluded from the ODI side.

Surely it matters, too, that Labuschagne is a man of deep religious faith, an evangelical Christian who thinks that this is all preordained, who thus sees his role as one of reaching this optimal zone, no matter how mysterious it may appear to the ordinary people.

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