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Labuschagne carefully spreads butter on each surface of a slice of soft bread. “That’s essential,” he explains as he brings down the lid of his grilled cheese press. “Perfect. Then you get it crisp on both sides.” He checks inside to reveal a toasted delight of pure toasted goodness, the bubbling cheese happily melting inside. “So this is the trick of the trade,” he announces. At which point, he does something unexpected and strange.

By now, it’s clear a glaze of ennui is beginning to appear in your eyes. The alarm bells of overly fancy prose are blinking intensely. You’re no doubt informed that Labuschagne hit 160 for his state team this week and is being eagerly promoted for an Australian Test recall before the Ashes.

You likely wish to read more about cricket matters. But first – you now realise with an anguished sigh – you’re going to have to sit through three paragraphs of light-hearted musing about toasted sandwiches, plus an extra unwanted bonus paragraph of tiresome meta‑deconstruction in the direct address. You groan once more.

Labuschagne flips the sandwich on to a dish and moves toward the fridge. “Few try this,” he states, “but I personally prefer the cold toastie. Boom, in the fridge. You allow the cheese to set, go bat, come back. Perfect. Toastie’s ready to go.”

On-Field Matters

Look, here’s the main point. How about we cover the sports aspect out of the way first? Quick update for reading until now. And while there may only be six weeks until the first Test, Labuschagne’s 100 runs against Tasmania – his third in recent months in all cricket – feels quietly decisive.

Here’s an Australia top three badly short of performance and method, exposed by the South African team in the World Test Championship final, highlighted further in the Caribbean afterwards. Labuschagne was omitted during that tour, but on some level you felt Australia were desperate to rehabilitate him at the soonest moment. Now he seems to have given them the ideal reason.

Here is a approach the team should follow. Usman Khawaja has just one 100 in his recent 44 batting efforts. Sam Konstas looks not quite a Test match opener and rather like the attractive performer who might portray a cricketer in a Bollywood movie. No other options has presented a strong argument. One contender looks finished. Marcus Harris is still inexplicably hanging around, like moths or damp. Meanwhile their skipper, the pace bowler, is injured and suddenly this seems like a surprisingly weak team, short of command or stability, 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 leading Test player as just two years ago, freshly dropped from the 50-over squad, the perfect character to bring stability to a fragile lineup. And we are told this is a more relaxed and thoughtful Labuschagne now: a pared-down, no-frills Labuschagne, not as extremely focused with small details. “It seems I’ve really stripped it back,” he said after his hundred. “Less focused on technique, just what I need to score runs.”

Clearly, nobody truly believes this. Probably this is a rebrand that exists only in Labuschagne’s mind: still constantly refining that technique from dawn to dusk, going deeper into fundamentals than any player has attempted. Prefer simplicity? Marnus will devote weeks in the training with coaches and video clips, thoroughly reshaping his game into the most basic batsman that has ever been seen. That’s the quality of the focused, and the quality that has always made Labuschagne one of the highly engaging sportsmen in the game.

The Broader Picture

Maybe before this very open historic rivalry, there is even a sort of interesting contrast to Labuschagne’s constant dedication. On England’s side we have a squad for whom any kind of analysis, not to mention self-review, is a kind of dangerous taboo. Trust your gut. Focus on the present. Live in the instant.

For Australia you have a batsman like Labuschagne, a man terminally obsessed with the sport and magnificently unbothered by others’ opinions, who observes cricket even in the spaces between the cricket, who handles this unusual pursuit with just the right measure of absurd reverence it deserves.

And it worked. During his focused era – from the moment he strode out to substitute for an injured Smith at Lord’s Cricket Ground in 2019 to through 2022 – Labuschagne somehow managed to see the game more deeply. To tap into it – through pure determination – on a higher, weirder, more frenzied level. During his stint in Kent league cricket, colleagues noticed him on the game day resting on a bench in a meditative condition, literally visualising all balls of his batting stint. According to Cricviz, during the initial period of his career a unusually large catches were spilled from his batting. Remarkably Labuschagne had intuited what would happen before fielders could respond to affect it.

Recent Challenges

Maybe this was why his career began to disintegrate the time he achieved top ranking. There were no worlds left to visualise, just a empty space before his eyes. Also – to be fair – he stopped trusting his signature shot, got unable to move forward and seemed to forget where his off-stump was. But it’s connected really. Meanwhile his mentor, his coach, thinks a focus on white-ball cricket started to undermine belief in his technique. Good news: he’s just been dropped from the one-day team.

No doubt it’s important, too, that Labuschagne is a strongly faithful person, an evangelical Christian who thinks that this is all preordained, who thus sees his job as one of accessing this state of flow, however enigmatic and inexplicable it may seem to the mortal of us.

This, to my mind, has always been the key distinction between him and Smith, a more naturally gifted player