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The Australian batsman evenly coats butter on both sides of a slice of plain 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 both sides.” He lifts the lid to reveal a golden square of ideal crispiness, the melted cheese happily sizzling within. “So this is the secret method,” he declares. At which point, he does something unexpected and strange.

Already, it’s clear a glaze of ennui is beginning to form across your eyes. The warning signs of elaborate writing are going off. You’re likely conscious that Labuschagne scored 160 for Queensland Bulls this week and is being feverishly talked up for an national team comeback before the Ashes series.

You probably want to read more about that. But first – you now grasp with irritation – you’re going to have to sit through three paragraphs of playful digression about toasted sandwiches, plus an further tangential section of overly analytical commentary in the second person. You sigh again.

He turns the sandwich on to a serving plate and walks across the fridge. “It’s uncommon,” he remarks, “but I actually like the cold toastie. There, in the fridge. You get that cheese to harden up, head to practice, come back. Boom. Toastie’s ready to go.”

Back to Cricket

Look, let’s try it like this. 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 first Test, Labuschagne’s 100 runs against the Tigers – his third this season in all formats – feels significantly impactful.

Here’s an Australia top three seriously lacking performance and method, exposed by the Proteas in the World Test Championship final, exposed again in the following Caribbean tour. Labuschagne was left out during that trip, but on one hand you gathered Australia were desperate to rehabilitate him at the soonest moment. Now he seems to have given them the ideal reason.

Here is a approach the team should follow. The opener has a single hundred in his past 44 innings. The young batsman looks less like a Test opener and closer to the attractive performer who might act as a batsman in a Indian film. None of the alternatives has made a cogent case. One contender looks out of form. Marcus Harris is still oddly present, like unwanted guests. Meanwhile their captain, Pat Cummins, is unfit and suddenly this appears as a unusually thin squad, short of command or stability, the kind of natural confidence that has often given Australia a lead before a ball is bowled.

The Batsman’s Revival

Step forward Marnus: a leading Test player as in the recent past, just left out from the 50-over squad, the right person to return structure to a fragile lineup. And we are informed this is a calmer and more meditative Labuschagne currently: a simplified, no-frills Labuschagne, no longer as extremely focused with small details. “I feel like I’ve really stripped it back,” he said after his century. “Not really too technical, just what I should make runs.”

Of course, this is doubted. In all likelihood this is a rebrand that exists entirely in Labuschagne’s mind: still endlessly adjusting that method from dawn to dusk, going further toward simplicity than anyone has ever dared. You want less technical? Marnus will spend months in the training with trainers and footage, exhaustively remoulding himself into the simplest player that has ever been seen. That’s the nature of the addict, and the characteristic that has consistently made Labuschagne one of the highly engaging sportsmen in the cricket.

Bigger Scene

It could be before this inscrutably unpredictable Ashes series, there is even a type of interesting contrast to Labuschagne’s constant dedication. In England we have a team for whom any kind of analysis, let alone self-analysis, is a forbidden topic. Feel the flavours. Be where the ball is. Smell the now.

For Australia you have a player such as Labuschagne, a individual terminally obsessed with the sport and wonderfully unconcerned by public perception, who observes cricket even in the gaps in the game, who treats this absurd sport with precisely the amount of odd devotion it deserves.

And it worked. During his intense period – from the time he walked out to replace a concussed Steve Smith at the famous ground in 2019 to through 2022 – Labuschagne found a way to see the game on another level. To reach it – through absolute focus – on a different, unusual, intense plane. During his stint in Kent league cricket, colleagues noticed him on the morning of a game positioned on a seat in a meditative condition, literally visualising every single ball of his innings. Per cricket statisticians, during the early stages of his career a surprisingly high proportion of catches were missed when he batted. In some way Labuschagne had intuited what would happen before others could react to affect it.

Form Issues

Perhaps 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 cover drive, got trapped on the crease and seemed to misjudge his positioning. But it’s part of the same issue. Meanwhile his mentor, his coach, reckons a focus on white-ball cricket started to undermine belief in his technique. Good news: he’s just been dropped from the ODI side.

Surely it matters, too, that Labuschagne is a man of deep religious faith, an evangelical Christian who holds that this is all basically written out in advance, who thus sees his role as one of accessing this state of flow, despite being puzzling it may seem to the rest of us.

This, to my mind, has always been the primary contrast between him and Steve Smith, a instinctive player