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Marnus carefully spreads butter on the top and bottom of a slice of plain bread. “That’s the key,” he explains as he brings down the lid of his toastie maker. “There you go. Then you get it golden on the outside.” He checks inside to reveal a perfectly browned of delicious perfection, the bubbling cheese happily bubbling away. “Here’s the key technique,” he declares. At which point, he does something horrific and unspeakable.

Already, it’s clear a layer of boredom is beginning to appear in your eyes. The alarm bells of elaborate writing are going off. You’re likely conscious that Labuschagne made 160 runs for his state team this week and is being eagerly promoted for an return to the Test side before the England-Australia contest.

You likely wish to read more about his performance. But first – you now understand with frustration – you’re going to have to endure several lines of playful digression about grilled cheese, plus an additional unnecessary part of self-referential analysis in the second person. You feel resigned.

Marnus transfers the sandwich on to a serving plate and heads over the fridge. “It’s uncommon,” he remarks, “but I actually like the toastie cold. Done, in the fridge. You get that cheese to harden up, go bat, come back. Perfect. Toastie’s ready to go.”

On-Field Matters

Okay, to cut to the chase. How about we cover the cricket bit to begin with? Quick update for reading until now. And while there may still be six weeks until the initial match, Labuschagne’s 100 runs against Tasmania – his third of the summer in all cricket – feels importantly timed.

Here’s an Aussie opening batsmen badly short of form and structure, exposed by the Proteas in the WTC final, exposed again in the Caribbean afterwards. Labuschagne was left out during that tour, but on one hand you felt Australia were eager to bring him back at the earliest chance. Now he seems to have given them the ideal reason.

Here is a strategy Australia must implement. Usman Khawaja has a single hundred in his past 44 innings. The young batsman looks hardly a Test opener and closer to the good-looking star who might play a Test opener in a Indian film. Other candidates has made a cogent case. One contender looks out of form. Another option is still inexplicably hanging around, like dust or mold. Meanwhile their captain, the pace bowler, is hurt and suddenly this appears as a unusually thin squad, short of command or stability, the kind of natural confidence that has often helped Australia dominate before a match begins.

Marnus’s Comeback

Step forward Marnus: a world No 1 Test batter as just two years ago, just left out from the ODI side, the perfect character to restore order to a fragile lineup. And we are informed this is a more relaxed and thoughtful Labuschagne now: a simplified, fundamental-focused Labuschagne, not as extremely focused with technical minutiae. “It seems I’ve really simplified things,” he said after his century. “Not overthinking, just what I should make runs.”

Naturally, nobody truly believes this. In all likelihood this is a new approach that exists only in Labuschagne’s mind: still endlessly adjusting that method from all day, going deeper into fundamentals than anyone has ever dared. Like basic approach? Marnus will spend months in the nets with advisors and replays, thoroughly reshaping his game into the most basic batsman that has ever been seen. This is just the trait of the obsessed, and the characteristic that has long made Labuschagne one of the deeply fascinating players in the game.

Wider Context

Maybe before this inscrutably unpredictable Ashes series, there is even a sort of interesting contrast to Labuschagne’s endless focus. In England we have a team for whom any kind of analysis, let alone self-analysis, is a risky subject. Go with instinct. Stay in the moment. Live in the instant.

In the other corner you have a batsman like Labuschagne, a individual terminally obsessed with the sport and magnificently unbothered by public perception, who finds cricket even in the moments outside play, who approaches this quirky game with precisely the amount of quirky respect it demands.

His method paid off. During his intense period – from the moment he strode out to substitute for an injured the senior batsman at the famous ground in 2019 to around the end of 2022 – Labuschagne somehow managed to see the game more deeply. To reach it – through pure determination – on a higher, weirder, more frenzied level. During his days playing club cricket, fellow players saw him on the day of a match resting on a bench in a meditative condition, actually imagining each delivery of his time at the crease. As per the analytics firm, during the initial period of his career a unusually large catches were dropped off his bat. In some way Labuschagne had anticipated outcomes before others could react to influence it.

Form Issues

Maybe this was why his form started to decline 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 lost faith in his favorite stroke, got unable to move forward and seemed to forget where his off-stump was. But it’s part of the same issue. Meanwhile his trainer, his coach, thinks a focus on white-ball cricket started to erode confidence in his alignment. Good news: he’s recently omitted from the one-day team.

No doubt it’s important, too, that Labuschagne is a strongly faithful person, an committed Christian who holds that this is all basically written out in advance, who thus sees his job as one of achieving this peak performance, however enigmatic and inexplicable it may seem to the ordinary people.

This approach, to my mind, has long been the primary contrast between him and the other batsman, a more naturally gifted player