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Marnus carefully spreads butter on both sides of a slice of soft bread. “That’s essential,” he explains as he closes the lid of his sandwich grill. “Perfect. Then you get it toasted on the outside.” He opens the grill to reveal a golden square of ideal crispiness, the bubbling cheese happily bubbling away. “So this is the key technique,” he announces. At which point, he does something unexpected and strange.

Already, it’s clear a glaze of ennui is beginning to appear in your eyes. The alarm bells of elaborate writing are flashing wildly. You’re probably aware that Labuschagne scored 160 for Queensland this week and is being widely discussed for an return to the Test side before the England-Australia contest.

You probably want to read more about that. But first – you now grasp with irritation – you’re going to have to endure several lines of wobbling whimsy about toasted sandwiches, plus an additional unnecessary part of tiresome meta‑deconstruction in the “you” perspective. You sigh again.

He turns the sandwich on to a dish and moves toward the fridge. “Few try this,” he remarks, “but I actually like the cold toastie. There, in the fridge. You let the cheese firm up, go bat, come back. Boom. Sandwich is perfect.”

Back to Cricket

Look, let’s try it like this. How about we cover the sports aspect to begin with? Quick update for making it this far. And while there may still be six weeks until the first Test, Labuschagne’s 100 runs against the Tasmanian side – his third this season in all cricket – feels quietly decisive.

Here’s an Aussie opening batsmen seriously lacking consistency and technique, exposed by South Africa in the Test championship decider, highlighted further in the Caribbean afterwards. Labuschagne was omitted during that series, but on a certain level you gathered Australia were desperate to rehabilitate him at the first opportunity. Now he looks to have given them the right opportunity.

Here is a plan that Australia need to work. Usman Khawaja has one century in his recent 44 batting efforts. Konstas looks hardly a Test match opener and closer to 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. Another option is still inexplicably hanging around, like unwanted guests. Meanwhile their leader, Cummins, is injured and suddenly this appears as a unusually thin squad, short of strength or equilibrium, the kind of effortless self-assurance that has often given Australia a lead before a ball is bowled.

Labuschagne’s Return

Step forward Marnus: a leading Test player as recently as 2023, just left out from the one-day team, the perfect character to bring stability to a brittle empire. And we are told this is a more relaxed and thoughtful Labuschagne now: a simplified, back-to-basics Labuschagne, less extremely focused with minor adjustments. “I feel like I’ve really stripped it back,” he said after his ton. “Less focused on technique, just what I need to make runs.”

Clearly, few accept this. Most likely this is a new approach that exists only in Labuschagne’s own head: still furiously stripping down that method from morning to night, going further toward simplicity than anyone else would try. Prefer simplicity? Marnus will take time in the nets with advisors and replays, exhaustively remoulding himself into the simplest player that has ever existed. This is simply the trait of the obsessed, and the trait that has long made Labuschagne one of the most wildly absorbing cricketers in the sport.

Bigger Scene

Maybe before this highly uncertain Ashes series, there is even a sort of pleasing dissonance to Labuschagne’s unquenchable obsession. In England we have a squad for whom any kind of analysis, especially personal critique, is a forbidden topic. Trust your gut. Stay in the moment. Live in the instant.

For Australia you have a player such as Labuschagne, a man terminally obsessed with cricket and wonderfully unconcerned by others’ opinions, who finds cricket even in the spaces between the cricket, who treats this absurd sport with precisely the amount of odd devotion it requires.

His method paid off. During his shamanic phase – from the moment he strode out to come in for a hurt Steve Smith at Lord’s Cricket Ground in 2019 to until late 2022 – Labuschagne somehow managed to see the game on another level. To access it – through absolute focus – on a different, unusual, intense plane. During his time with Kent league cricket, teammates would find him on the game day sitting on a park bench in a meditative condition, actually imagining each delivery of his batting stint. According to cricket statisticians, during the early stages of his career a statistically unfathomable proportion of catches were spilled from his batting. In some way Labuschagne had intuited what would happen before others could react to change it.

Recent Challenges

Perhaps this was why his performance dipped the point he became number one. There were no further goals to picture, just a boundless, uncharted void before his eyes. Additionally – he stopped trusting his signature shot, got trapped on the crease and seemed to forget where his off-stump was. But it’s connected really. Meanwhile his coach, his coach, reckons a focus on white-ball cricket started to erode confidence in his positioning. Encouragingly: he’s now excluded from the one-day team.

No doubt it’s important, too, that Labuschagne is a man of deep religious faith, an committed Christian who thinks that this is all predetermined, who thus sees his task as one of reaching this optimal zone, no matter how mysterious it may look to the rest of us.

This approach, to my mind, has consistently been the main point of difference between him and Smith, a instinctive player