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Labuschagne evenly coats butter on each surface of a slice of plain bread. “That’s the key,” he tells the camera as he brings down the lid of his grilled cheese press. “There you go. Then you get it golden on each side.” He lifts the lid to reveal a toasted delight of pure toasted goodness, the bubbling cheese happily bubbling away. “Here’s the trick of the trade,” he announces. At which point, he does something horrific and unspeakable.

Already, you may feel a sense of disinterest is beginning to appear in your eyes. The warning signs of overly fancy prose are going off. You’re probably aware that Labuschagne scored 160 for Queensland this week and is being widely discussed for an national team comeback before the Ashes series.

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 three paragraphs of light-hearted musing about toasted sandwiches, plus an further tangential section of tiresome meta‑deconstruction in the second person. You sigh again.

Labuschagne flips the sandwich on to a plate and walks across the fridge. “Few try this,” he states, “but I genuinely enjoy the toastie cold. There, in the fridge. You get that cheese to harden up, go for a hit, come back. Alright. Toastie’s ready to go.”

Back to Cricket

Okay, to cut to the chase. How about we cover the cricket bit to begin with? Little treat for reading until now. And while there may be just six weeks until the series opener, Labuschagne’s 100 runs against Tasmania – his third in recent months in all cricket – feels quietly decisive.

We have an Australia top three clearly missing performance and method, exposed by South Africa in the WTC final, highlighted further in the Caribbean afterwards. Labuschagne was left out during that tour, but on some level you felt Australia were desperate to rehabilitate him at the earliest chance. Now he seems to have given them the perfect excuse.

And this is a strategy Australia must implement. The opener has a single hundred in his past 44 innings. Sam Konstas looks not quite a first-innings batsman and more like the good-looking star who might portray a cricketer in a Bollywood epic. Other candidates has presented a strong argument. Nathan McSweeney looks out of form. Marcus Harris is still inexplicably hanging around, like dust or mold. Meanwhile their skipper, Cummins, is unfit and suddenly this appears as a surprisingly weak team, missing strength or equilibrium, the kind of natural confidence that has often put Australia 2-0 up before a match begins.

The Batsman’s Revival

Step forward Marnus: a top-ranked Test batsman as recently as 2023, freshly dropped from the ODI side, the right person to restore order to a brittle empire. And we are informed this is a composed and reflective Labuschagne now: a streamlined, no-frills Labuschagne, no longer as maniacally obsessed with technical minutiae. “I feel like I’ve really simplified things,” he said after his century. “Not really too technical, just what I need to bat effectively.”

Naturally, few accept this. Most likely this is a new approach 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 trainers and footage, exhaustively remoulding himself into the least technical batter that has ever existed. This is just the trait of the obsessed, and the characteristic that has consistently made Labuschagne one of the highly engaging sportsmen in the sport.

Wider Context

It could be before this very open Ashes series, there is even a type of interesting contrast to Labuschagne’s endless focus. In England we have a team for whom detailed examination, let alone self-analysis, is a kind of dangerous taboo. Feel the flavours. Focus on the present. Live in the instant.

On the opposite side you have a individual like Labuschagne, a individual utterly absorbed with the sport and magnificently unbothered by who knows about it, who finds cricket even in the moments outside play, who approaches this quirky game with just the right measure of absurd reverence it demands.

His method paid off. During his focused era – from the instant he appeared to substitute for an injured Smith at the famous ground in 2019 to until late 2022 – Labuschagne somehow managed to see the game more deeply. To tap into it – through pure determination – on a elevated, strange, passionate tier. During his time with club cricket, colleagues noticed him on the game day resting on a bench in a focused mindset, mentally rehearsing all balls of his time at the crease. Per the analytics firm, during the initial period of his career a statistically unfathomable proportion of catches were dropped off his bat. In some way Labuschagne had anticipated outcomes before others could react to influence it.

Recent Challenges

Maybe this was why his career began to disintegrate the point he became number one. There were no new heights to imagine, just a boundless, uncharted void before his eyes. Furthermore – he lost faith in his signature shot, got trapped on the crease and seemed to lose awareness of his stumps. But it’s all the same thing. Meanwhile his mentor, his coach, reckons a attention to shorter formats started to erode confidence in his alignment. Positive development: he’s just been dropped from the 50-over squad.

No doubt it’s important, too, that Labuschagne is a man of deep religious faith, an committed Christian who believes that this is all predetermined, who thus sees his task as one of achieving this peak performance, no matter how mysterious it may appear to the ordinary people.

This approach, to my mind, has always been the key distinction between him and Smith, a inherently talented player