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The Australian batsman carefully spreads butter on both sides of a slice of white bread. “That’s essential,” he explains as he closes the lid of his toastie maker. “Perfect. Then you get it golden on the outside.” He checks inside to reveal a golden square of ideal crispiness, the bubbling cheese happily bubbling away. “Here’s the secret method,” he announces. At which point, he does something shocking and odd.

At this stage, it’s clear a sense of disinterest is beginning to cover your eyes. The alarm bells of sportswriting pretension are flashing wildly. You’re likely conscious that Labuschagne scored 160 for Queensland Bulls this week and is being feverishly talked up for an return to the Test side before the Ashes.

You likely wish to read more about his performance. But first – you now realise with an anguished sigh – you’re going to have to sit through a section of wobbling whimsy about toasted sandwiches, plus an additional unnecessary part of self-referential analysis in the direct address. You groan once more.

He turns the sandwich on to a dish and heads over 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. Boom. Toastie’s ready to go.”

Back to Cricket

Okay, to cut to the chase. Shall we get the sports aspect out of the way first? Quick update 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 quietly decisive.

Here’s an Australian top order clearly missing form and structure, revealed against the Proteas in the World Test Championship final, exposed again in the following Caribbean tour. Labuschagne was left out during that tour, but on a certain level you felt Australia were desperate to rehabilitate him at the earliest chance. Now he appears to have given them the perfect excuse.

Here is a plan that Australia need to work. Usman Khawaja has one century in his recent 44 batting efforts. The young batsman looks not quite a Test match opener and closer to the attractive performer who might portray a cricketer in a Bollywood movie. No other options has presented a strong argument. Nathan McSweeney looks finished. Harris is still surprisingly included, like moths or damp. Meanwhile their skipper, the pace bowler, is unfit and suddenly this seems like a unusually thin squad, lacking strength or equilibrium, the kind of natural confidence that has often given Australia a lead before a match begins.

The Batsman’s Revival

Enter Marnus: a top-ranked Test batsman as in the recent past, just left out from the one-day team, the ideal candidate to return structure to a brittle empire. And we are told this is a calmer and more meditative Labuschagne these days: a streamlined, no-frills Labuschagne, not as extremely focused with technical minutiae. “I feel like I’ve really stripped it back,” he said after his century. “Less focused on technique, just what I should bat effectively.”

Clearly, nobody truly believes this. In all likelihood this is a fresh image that exists just in Labuschagne’s mind: still endlessly adjusting that method from dawn to dusk, going further toward simplicity than anyone else would try. Prefer simplicity? Marnus will devote weeks in the practice sessions with coaches and video clips, exhaustively remoulding himself into the simplest player that has ever played. That’s the nature of the addict, and the quality that has always made Labuschagne one of the most wildly absorbing sportsmen in the game.

Wider Context

Perhaps before this inscrutably unpredictable Ashes series, there is even a kind of appealing difference to Labuschagne’s unquenchable obsession. For England we have a side for whom technical study, not to mention self-review, is a forbidden topic. Feel the flavours. Focus on the present. Live in the instant.

In the other corner you have a individual like Labuschagne, a player terminally obsessed with the sport and totally indifferent by who knows about it, who observes cricket even in the gaps in the game, who treats this absurd sport with precisely the amount of absurd reverence it demands.

This approach succeeded. During his focused era – from the moment he strode out to substitute for an injured Smith at the famous ground in 2019 to until late 2022 – Labuschagne was able to see the game more deeply. To access it – through pure determination – on a elevated, strange, passionate tier. During his stint in club cricket, teammates would find him on the game day sitting on a park bench in a focused mindset, literally visualising all balls of his time at the crease. As per Cricviz, during the early stages of his career a unusually large proportion of catches were missed when he batted. Somehow Labuschagne had predicted events before others could react to influence it.

Current Struggles

Maybe this was why his form started to decline the point he became number one. There were no worlds left to visualise, just a unknown territory before his eyes. Additionally – he stopped trusting his signature shot, got unable to move forward and seemed to forget where his off-stump was. But it’s connected really. Meanwhile his mentor, Neil D’Costa, reckons a focus on white-ball cricket started to erode confidence in his alignment. Positive development: he’s just been dropped from the ODI side.

Surely it matters, too, that Labuschagne is a man of deep religious faith, an religious believer who holds that this is all preordained, who thus sees his role as one of achieving this peak performance, however enigmatic and inexplicable it may look to the rest of us.

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