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The Australian batsman evenly coats butter on each surface of a slice of plain bread. “That’s the secret,” he explains as he brings down the lid of his grilled cheese press. “Perfect. Then you get it toasted on both sides.” He checks inside to reveal a perfectly browned of ideal crispiness, the gooey cheese happily bubbling away. “Here’s the trick of the trade,” he explains. At which point, he does something horrific and unspeakable.

Already, you may feel a glaze of ennui is beginning to form across your eyes. The red lights of sportswriting pretension are going off. You’re no doubt informed that Labuschagne scored 160 for Queensland this week and is being widely discussed for an Australian Test recall before the Ashes.

You probably want to read more about that. But first – you now understand with frustration – you’re going to have to sit through a section of light-hearted musing about grilled cheese, plus an further tangential section of self-referential analysis in the “you” perspective. You feel resigned.

He turns the sandwich on to a dish and heads over the fridge. “Few try this,” he remarks, “but I actually like the grilled sandwich chilled. There, in the fridge. You get that cheese to harden up, go for a hit, come back. Boom. It’s ideal.”

Back to Cricket

Alright, here’s the main point. How about we cover the sports aspect initially? Quick update for making it this far. And while there may still be six weeks until the series opener, Labuschagne’s 100 runs against the Tigers – his third of the summer in all cricket – feels importantly timed.

Here’s an Aussie opening batsmen seriously lacking consistency and technique, shown up by South Africa in the World Test Championship final, highlighted further in the Caribbean afterwards. Labuschagne was dropped during that trip, but on some level you sensed Australia were keen to restore him at the earliest chance. Now he seems to have given them the ideal reason.

This represents a strategy Australia must implement. The opener has just one 100 in his last 44 knocks. Sam Konstas looks less like a Test match opener and closer to the good-looking star who might play a Test opener in a Indian film. Other candidates has shown convincing form. Nathan McSweeney looks finished. Marcus Harris is still surprisingly included, like moths or damp. Meanwhile their captain, the pace bowler, is injured and suddenly this feels like a surprisingly weak team, lacking authority or balance, the kind of natural confidence that has often given Australia a lead before a ball is bowled.

The Batsman’s Revival

Enter Marnus: a leading Test player as recently as 2023, recently omitted from the 50-over squad, the right person to return structure to a shaky team. And we are informed this is a calmer and more meditative Labuschagne currently: a pared-down, fundamental-focused Labuschagne, less intensely fixated with minor adjustments. “I believe I have really simplified things,” he said after his hundred. “Not overthinking, just what I should score runs.”

Clearly, this is doubted. Most likely this is a new approach that exists only in Labuschagne’s mind: still constantly refining that method from all day, going more back to basics than anyone has ever dared. You want less technical? Marnus will spend months in the practice sessions with trainers and footage, thoroughly reshaping his game into the most basic batsman that has ever played. This is just the nature of the addict, and the trait that has long made Labuschagne one of the highly engaging players in the cricket.

The Broader Picture

Maybe before this inscrutably unpredictable Ashes series, there is even a type of appealing difference to Labuschagne’s endless focus. On England’s side we have a squad for whom any kind of analysis, especially personal critique, is a kind of dangerous taboo. Feel the flavours. Be where the ball is. Live in the instant.

On the opposite side you have a player such as Labuschagne, a player completely dedicated with cricket and wonderfully unconcerned by others’ opinions, who sees cricket even in the moments outside play, who treats this absurd sport with precisely the amount of odd devotion it requires.

His method paid off. During his shamanic phase – from the instant he appeared to come in for a hurt the senior batsman at Lord’s in 2019 to around the end of 2022 – Labuschagne somehow managed to see the game with greater insight. To tap into it – through sheer intensity of will – on a elevated, strange, passionate tier. During his time with club cricket, teammates would find him on the day of a match sitting on a park bench in a focused mindset, actually imagining every single ball of his innings. As per the analytics firm, during the early stages of his career a statistically unfathomable catches were dropped off his bat. Remarkably Labuschagne had intuited what would happen before anyone had a chance to affect it.

Form Issues

Perhaps this was why his performance dipped the time he achieved top ranking. There were no new heights to imagine, just a unknown territory before his eyes. Also – to be fair – he stopped trusting his favorite stroke, got trapped on the crease and seemed to forget where his off-stump was. But it’s all the same thing. Meanwhile his trainer, D’Costa, reckons a focus on white-ball cricket started to weaken assurance in his alignment. Good news: he’s just been dropped from the 50-over squad.

Certainly it’s relevant, too, that Labuschagne is a strongly faithful person, an religious believer who thinks that this is all preordained, who thus sees his task as one of achieving this peak performance, no matter how mysterious it may seem to the mortal of us.

This approach, to my mind, has consistently been the main point of difference between him and Steve Smith, a inherently talented player