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The Australian batsman evenly coats butter on the top and bottom of a slice of plain bread. “That’s the secret,” he tells the camera as he lowers the lid of his toastie maker. “Perfect. Then you get it golden on each side.” He opens the grill to reveal a toasted delight of ideal crispiness, the gooey cheese happily melting inside. “So this is the trick of the trade,” he explains. At which point, he does something shocking and odd.

By now, you may feel a glaze of ennui is beginning to appear in your eyes. The alarm bells of overly fancy prose are flashing wildly. You’re no doubt informed that Labuschagne made 160 runs for Queensland Bulls this week and is being feverishly talked up for an Australian Test recall before the Ashes series.

You probably want to read more about that. But first – you now understand with frustration – you’re going to have to sit through several lines of wobbling whimsy about toasted sandwiches, plus an additional unnecessary part of overly analytical commentary in the direct address. You sigh again.

He turns the sandwich on to a serving plate and heads over the fridge. “Not many people do this,” he announces, “but I genuinely enjoy the grilled sandwich chilled. Done, in the fridge. You get that cheese to harden up, head to practice, come back. Boom. It’s ideal.”

On-Field Matters

Okay, to cut to the chase. Let’s address the match details out of the way first? Small reward for making it this far. And while there may be just six weeks until the series opener, Labuschagne’s century against the Tasmanian side – his third of the summer in all cricket – feels importantly timed.

This is an Australian top order seriously lacking consistency and technique, shown up by South Africa in the WTC final, highlighted further in the following Caribbean tour. Labuschagne was dropped during that trip, but on a certain level you felt Australia were keen to restore him at the first opportunity. Now he seems to have given them the perfect excuse.

This represents a strategy Australia must implement. The opener has just one 100 in his recent 44 batting efforts. The young batsman looks less like a first-innings batsman and rather like the handsome actor who might portray a cricketer in a Bollywood movie. No other options has made a cogent case. Nathan McSweeney looks cooked. Harris is still inexplicably hanging around, like unwanted guests. Meanwhile their captain, the pace bowler, is injured and suddenly this seems like a weirdly lightweight side, lacking authority or balance, the kind of effortless self-assurance that has often given Australia a lead before a game starts.

The Batsman’s Revival

Enter Marnus: a leading Test player as recently as 2023, freshly dropped from the ODI side, the right person to restore order to a fragile lineup. And we are informed this is a more relaxed and thoughtful Labuschagne currently: a simplified, back-to-basics Labuschagne, less extremely focused with minor adjustments. “I feel like I’ve really cut out extras,” he said after his century. “Less focused on technique, just what I should bat effectively.”

Of course, this is doubted. Probably this is a new approach that exists entirely in Labuschagne’s mind: still constantly refining that technique from dawn to dusk, going further toward simplicity than anyone has ever dared. Prefer simplicity? Marnus will devote weeks in the nets with trainers and footage, exhaustively remoulding himself into the most basic batsman that has ever existed. That’s the quality of the focused, and the characteristic that has consistently made Labuschagne one of the deeply fascinating sportsmen in the game.

The Broader Picture

It could be before this highly uncertain England-Australia contest, there is even a type of appealing difference to Labuschagne’s endless focus. In England we have a team for whom technical study, not to mention self-review, is a kind of dangerous taboo. Trust your gut. Be where the ball is. Smell the now.

In the other corner you have a individual like Labuschagne, a individual utterly absorbed with cricket and wonderfully unconcerned by who knows about it, who finds cricket even in the moments outside play, who handles this unusual pursuit with precisely the amount of quirky respect it deserves.

And it worked. During his focused era – from the moment he strode out to come in for a hurt the senior batsman at Lord’s in 2019 to through 2022 – Labuschagne found a way to see the game on another level. To tap into it – through pure determination – on a elevated, strange, passionate tier. During his time with club cricket, teammates would find him on the morning of a game positioned on a seat in a trance-like state, literally visualising each delivery of his batting stint. According to Cricviz, during the first few years of his career a unusually large number of chances were spilled from his batting. Remarkably Labuschagne had predicted events before others could react to change it.

Recent Challenges

Perhaps this was why his form started to decline the time he achieved top ranking. There were no new heights to imagine, just a boundless, uncharted void before his eyes. Additionally – he stopped trusting his signature shot, got stuck in his crease and seemed to forget where his off-stump was. But it’s connected really. Meanwhile his trainer, his coach, thinks a focus on white-ball cricket started to weaken assurance in his alignment. Good news: he’s just been dropped from the one-day team.

Certainly it’s relevant, too, that Labuschagne is a strongly faithful person, an evangelical Christian who thinks that this is all predetermined, who thus sees his role as one of accessing this state of flow, however enigmatic and inexplicable it may look to the ordinary people.

This mindset, to my mind, has long been the main point of difference between him and Smith, a more naturally gifted player