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Marnus carefully spreads butter on the top and bottom of a slice of plain bread. “That’s the secret,” he explains as he closes the lid of his sandwich grill. “There you go. Then you get it golden on the outside.” He opens the grill to reveal a perfectly browned of delicious perfection, the melted cheese happily bubbling away. “And that’s the secret method,” he explains. At which point, he does something shocking and odd.

By now, you may feel a glaze of ennui is beginning to cover your eyes. The red lights of elaborate writing are flashing wildly. You’re no doubt informed that Labuschagne scored 160 for his state team this week and is being widely discussed for an return to the Test side before the Ashes series.

No doubt you’d prefer to read more about his performance. But first – you now grasp with irritation – you’re going to have to get through three paragraphs of wobbling whimsy about toasties, plus an additional unnecessary part of tiresome meta‑deconstruction in the second person. You feel resigned.

He turns the sandwich on to a plate and heads over the fridge. “Not many people do this,” he states, “but I genuinely enjoy the toastie cold. Boom, in the fridge. You get that cheese to harden up, go for a hit, come back. Boom. It’s ideal.”

The Cricket Context

Alright, let’s try it like this. Let’s address the cricket bit out of the way first? Quick update for making it this far. And while there may only be six weeks until the initial match, Labuschagne’s century against the Tasmanian side – his third of the summer in various games – feels quietly decisive.

Here’s an Australia top three badly short of form and structure, shown up by the South African team in the World Test Championship final, exposed again in the Caribbean afterwards. Labuschagne was dropped during that trip, but on some level you felt Australia were eager to bring him back at the earliest chance. Now he appears to have given them the right opportunity.

Here is a plan that Australia need to work. Khawaja has one century in his last 44 knocks. Sam Konstas looks less like a Test match opener and more like the good-looking star who might portray a cricketer in a Bollywood epic. Other candidates has made a cogent case. One contender looks cooked. Marcus Harris is still inexplicably hanging around, like dust or mold. Meanwhile their skipper, Cummins, is hurt and suddenly this appears as a unusually thin squad, missing authority or balance, the kind of built-in belief that has often put Australia 2-0 up before a match begins.

The Batsman’s Revival

Here comes Labuschagne: a top-ranked Test batsman as just two years ago, just left out from the 50-over squad, the right person to bring stability to a shaky team. And we are advised this is a more relaxed and thoughtful Labuschagne currently: a pared-down, no-frills Labuschagne, less extremely focused with technical minutiae. “It seems I’ve really cut out extras,” he said after his ton. “Less focused on technique, just what I must score runs.”

Clearly, this is doubted. Most likely this is a rebrand that exists just in Labuschagne’s personal view: still furiously stripping down that technique from morning to night, going more back to basics than any player has attempted. Prefer simplicity? Marnus will spend months in the nets with coaches and video clips, thoroughly reshaping his game into the most basic batsman that has ever played. That’s the trait of the obsessed, and the trait that has consistently made Labuschagne one of the deeply fascinating cricketers in the sport.

The Broader Picture

Maybe before this inscrutably unpredictable historic rivalry, there is even a type of pleasing dissonance to Labuschagne’s endless focus. On England’s side we have a side for whom technical study, not to mention self-review, is a forbidden topic. Trust your gut. Focus on the present. Embrace the current.

On the opposite side you have a player such as Labuschagne, a player completely dedicated with the sport and wonderfully unconcerned by others’ opinions, who finds cricket even in the spaces between the cricket, who handles this unusual pursuit with just the right measure of absurd reverence it deserves.

This approach succeeded. During his focused era – from the instant he appeared to replace a concussed Smith at Lord’s in 2019 to until late 2022 – Labuschagne found a way to see the game more deeply. To reach it – through absolute focus – on a higher, weirder, more frenzied level. During his stint in club cricket, teammates would find him on the day of a match sitting on a park bench in a meditative condition, literally visualising all balls of his time at the crease. Per cricket statisticians, during the initial period of his career a statistically unfathomable proportion of catches were spilled from his batting. Somehow Labuschagne had predicted events before others could react to affect it.

Recent Challenges

Maybe this was why his performance dipped the moment he reached the summit. There were no worlds left to visualise, just a unknown territory before his eyes. Also – to be fair – he lost faith in his signature shot, got unable to move forward and seemed to lose awareness of his stumps. But it’s connected really. Meanwhile his mentor, D’Costa, reckons a focus on white-ball cricket started to weaken assurance in his positioning. Good news: he’s now excluded from the 50-over squad.

Certainly it’s relevant, too, that Labuschagne is a man of deep religious faith, an committed Christian who thinks that this is all predetermined, who thus sees his role as one of achieving this peak performance, despite being puzzling it may seem to the rest of us.

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