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The Australian batsman carefully spreads butter on the top and bottom of a slice of white bread. “That’s essential,” he explains as he brings down the lid of his grilled cheese press. “There you go. Then you get it crisp on each side.” He opens the grill to reveal a golden square of delicious perfection, the gooey cheese happily melting inside. “So this is the trick of the trade,” he explains. At which point, he does something unexpected and strange.

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

You likely wish to read more about that. But first – you now understand with frustration – you’re going to have to get through several lines of playful digression about toasted sandwiches, plus an additional unnecessary part of self-referential analysis in the direct address. You sigh again.

He turns the sandwich on to a plate and walks across the fridge. “It’s uncommon,” he remarks, “but I genuinely enjoy the grilled sandwich chilled. There, in the fridge. You allow the cheese to set, go bat, come back. Boom. Toastie’s ready to go.”

The Cricket Context

Okay, to cut to the chase. Shall we get the match details initially? Small reward for making it this far. And while there may still be six weeks until the initial match, Labuschagne’s hundred against Tasmania – his third this season in various games – feels importantly timed.

We have an Aussie opening batsmen clearly missing consistency and technique, shown up by the Proteas in the World Test Championship final, exposed again in the West Indies after that. Labuschagne was left out during that tour, but on one hand you sensed Australia were desperate to rehabilitate him at the soonest moment. Now he looks to have given them the ideal reason.

Here is a strategy Australia must implement. The opener has just one 100 in his last 44 knocks. Konstas looks less like a Test opener and rather like the handsome actor who might act as a batsman in a Bollywood movie. None of the alternatives has made a cogent case. Nathan McSweeney looks cooked. Marcus Harris is still surprisingly included, like moths or damp. Meanwhile their skipper, Pat Cummins, is hurt and suddenly this appears as a weirdly lightweight side, short of authority or balance, the kind of natural confidence that has often given Australia a lead before a ball is bowled.

Marnus’s Comeback

Step forward Marnus: a top-ranked Test batsman as recently as 2023, just left out from the one-day team, the ideal candidate to return structure to a shaky team. And we are told this is a calmer and more meditative Labuschagne these days: a simplified, fundamental-focused Labuschagne, not as extremely focused with minor adjustments. “It seems I’ve really stripped it back,” he said after his ton. “Not overthinking, just what I need to make runs.”

Naturally, nobody truly believes this. Probably this is a new approach that exists just in Labuschagne’s mind: still furiously stripping down that method from dawn to dusk, going deeper into fundamentals than anyone else would try. Prefer simplicity? Marnus will devote weeks in the nets with coaches and video clips, thoroughly reshaping his game into the simplest player that has ever been seen. This is just the quality of the focused, and the trait that has consistently made Labuschagne one of the most wildly absorbing sportsmen in the game.

The Broader Picture

Perhaps before this very open Ashes series, there is even a sort of pleasing dissonance to Labuschagne’s constant dedication. For England we have a squad for whom detailed examination, let alone self-analysis, is a risky subject. Feel the flavours. Stay in the moment. Live in the instant.

For Australia you have a batsman like Labuschagne, a man completely dedicated with cricket and magnificently unbothered by others’ opinions, who observes cricket even in the gaps in the game, who approaches this quirky game with precisely the amount of quirky respect it demands.

His method paid off. During his focused era – from the instant he appeared to substitute for an injured the senior batsman at the famous ground in 2019 to around the end of 2022 – Labuschagne was able to see the game more deeply. To tap into it – through pure determination – on a higher, weirder, more frenzied level. During his time with English county cricket, fellow players saw him on the day of a match resting on a bench in a focused mindset, actually imagining every single ball of his innings. According to the analytics firm, during the first few years of his career a statistically unfathomable number of chances were missed when he batted. In some way Labuschagne had intuited what would happen before others could react to affect it.

Recent Challenges

Perhaps this was why his form started to decline the moment he reached the summit. There were no new heights to imagine, just a unknown territory before his eyes. Furthermore – he lost faith in his cover drive, got unable to move forward and seemed to misjudge his positioning. But it’s all the same thing. Meanwhile his coach, Neil D’Costa, reckons a emphasis on limited-overs started to erode confidence in his alignment. Encouragingly: he’s recently omitted from the ODI side.

No doubt it’s important, too, that Labuschagne is a devoutly religious individual, an committed Christian who thinks that this is all basically written out in advance, who thus sees his role as one of achieving this peak performance, despite being puzzling it may appear to the rest of us.

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