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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 brings down the lid of his toastie maker. “Perfect. Then you get it golden on the outside.” He opens the grill to reveal a toasted delight of ideal crispiness, the bubbling cheese happily sizzling within. “Here’s the trick of the trade,” he declares. At which point, he does something horrific and unspeakable.

By now, you may feel a sense of disinterest is beginning to appear in your eyes. The alarm bells of overly fancy prose are flashing wildly. You’re likely conscious that Labuschagne made 160 runs for Queensland this week and is being widely discussed for an national team comeback before the Ashes.

No doubt you’d prefer to read more about that. But first – you now grasp with irritation – you’re going to have to endure several lines of light-hearted musing about grilled cheese, plus an additional unnecessary part of tiresome meta‑deconstruction in the second person. You sigh again.

Labuschagne flips the sandwich on to a serving plate and heads over the fridge. “Not many people do this,” he announces, “but I personally prefer the toastie cold. Done, in the fridge. You get that cheese to harden up, go for a hit, come back. Perfect. Toastie’s ready to go.”

The Cricket Context

Okay, let’s try it like this. How about we cover the match details to begin with? Small reward for reading until now. And while there may only be six weeks until the first Test, Labuschagne’s century against Tasmania – his third in recent months in various games – feels quietly decisive.

We have an Aussie opening batsmen seriously lacking performance and method, exposed by the Proteas in the World Test Championship final, exposed again in the following Caribbean tour. Labuschagne was dropped during that tour, but on one hand you sensed Australia were desperate to rehabilitate him at the first opportunity. Now he looks to have given them the perfect excuse.

And this is a strategy Australia must implement. The opener has one century in his last 44 knocks. Sam Konstas looks hardly a Test opener and closer to the good-looking star who might play a Test opener in a Bollywood epic. None of the alternatives has presented a strong argument. One contender looks cooked. Harris is still oddly present, like unwanted guests. Meanwhile their skipper, the pace bowler, is hurt and suddenly this seems like a unusually thin squad, short of strength or equilibrium, the kind of effortless self-assurance that has often put Australia 2-0 up before a ball is bowled.

Labuschagne’s Return

Here comes Labuschagne: a top-ranked Test batsman as recently as 2023, recently omitted from the one-day team, the perfect character to return structure to a shaky team. And we are told this is a composed and reflective Labuschagne currently: a streamlined, no-frills Labuschagne, no longer as intensely fixated with technical minutiae. “I believe I have really simplified things,” he said after his ton. “Not really too technical, just what I need to make runs.”

Clearly, this is doubted. Probably this is a new approach that exists entirely in Labuschagne’s mind: still constantly refining that technique from dawn to dusk, going deeper into fundamentals than anyone has ever dared. You want less technical? Marnus will spend months in the training with coaches and video clips, completely transforming into the simplest player that has ever been seen. That’s the quality of the focused, and the quality that has always made Labuschagne one of the deeply fascinating players in the game.

The Broader Picture

It could be 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 squad for whom technical study, not to mention self-review, is a risky subject. Go with instinct. Focus on the present. Embrace the current.

For Australia you have a batsman like Labuschagne, a player utterly absorbed with cricket and magnificently unbothered by who knows about it, who sees cricket even in the spaces between the cricket, who handles this unusual pursuit with just the right measure of absurd reverence it demands.

His method paid off. During his intense period – from the time he walked out to come in for a hurt 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 different, unusual, intense plane. During his stint in club cricket, colleagues noticed him on the game day resting on a bench in a trance-like state, literally visualising all balls of his time at the crease. According to cricket statisticians, during the initial period of his career a unusually large number of chances were spilled from his batting. In some way Labuschagne had anticipated outcomes before others could react to affect it.

Current Struggles

Maybe this was why his performance dipped the time he achieved top ranking. There were no worlds left to visualise, just a unknown territory before his eyes. Furthermore – he began doubting his signature shot, got stuck in his crease and seemed to misjudge his positioning. But it’s connected really. Meanwhile his mentor, Neil D’Costa, reckons a attention to shorter formats started to weaken assurance in his positioning. Encouragingly: he’s recently omitted from the 50-over squad.

Certainly it’s relevant, too, that Labuschagne is a devoutly religious individual, an evangelical Christian who believes that this is all basically written out in advance, who thus sees his role as one of achieving this peak performance, no matter how mysterious it may appear to the ordinary people.

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