Marnus Labuschagne carefully spreads butter on both sides of a slice of white bread. \u201cThat\u2019s the key,\u201d he tells the camera as he brings down the lid of his sandwich grill. \u201cBoom. Then you get it crisp on both sides.\u201d He lifts the lid to reveal a golden square of pure toasted goodness, the melted cheese happily bubbling away inside. \u201cSo this is the trick of the trade,\u201d he announces. At which point, he does something horrific and unspeakable.<\/p>\n
Already, I sense, a glaze of ennui is beginning to form across your eyes. The red lights of sportswriting pretension are flashing wildly. You\u2019re probably aware that Labuschagne scored 160 for Queensland this week and is being feverishly talked up for an Australian Test recall before the Ashes.<\/p>\n
You probably want to read more about that. But first \u2013 you now realise with an anguished sigh \u2013 you\u2019re going to have to sit through three paragraphs of wobbling whimsy about toasted sandwiches, plus an extra unwanted bonus paragraph of tiresome meta\u2011deconstruction in the second person. You sigh again.<\/p>\n
Labuschagne flips the sandwich on to a plate and walks across to the fridge. \u201cNot many people do this,\u201d he announces, \u201cbut I actually like the toastie cold. Boom, in the fridge. You get that cheese to harden up, go for a hit, come back. Boom. Toastie\u2019s ready to go.\u201d<\/p>\n
Look, let\u2019s try it like this. Shall we get the cricket bit out of the way first? Little treat for making it this far. And while there may still be six weeks until the first Test, Labuschagne\u2019s century against Tasmania \u2013 his third of the summer in all cricket \u2013 feels quietly decisive.<\/p>\n
This is an Australia\u00a9 top three badly short of form and structure, exposed by South Africa in the World Test Championship final, exposed again in the Caribbean afterwards. Labuschagne was dropped during that tour, but on some level you sensed Australia were desperate to rehabilitate him at the first opportunity. Now he appears to have given them the perfect excuse.<\/p>\n
Marnus Labuschagne became the first concussion substitute in Test cricket, against England at Lord\u2019s in 2019, scoring 59 in the second innings. Photograph: Tom Jenkins\/The Guardian<\/p>\n
And this is a plan that Australia need to work. Usman Khawaja has one century in his past 44 innings. Sam Konstas looks less like a Test opener and more like the handsome actor who might play a Test opener in a Bollywood epic. None of the alternatives has made a cogent case. Nathan McSweeney looks cooked. Marcus Harris is still inexplicably hanging around the place, like moths or damp. Meanwhile their captain, Pat Cummins, is injured<\/a> and suddenly this feels like a weirdly lightweight side, short of authority or balance, the kind of effortless self-assurance that has often put Australia 2-0 up before a ball is bowled.<\/p>\n Enter Marnus: a world No 1 Test batter as recently as 2023, freshly dropped from the 50-over squad<\/a>, the perfect character to restore order to a brittle empire. And we are told this is a calmer and more meditative Labuschagne these days: a pared-down, back-to-basics Labuschagne, no longer as maniacally obsessed with technical minutiae. \u201cI feel like I\u2019ve really stripped it back,\u201d he said after his century. \u201cNot really too technical, just what I need to score runs.\u201d<\/p>\n Of course, nobody truly believes this. Most likely this is a rebrand that exists entirely in Labuschagne\u2019s own head: still furiously stripping down that technique from dawn to dusk, going more back to basics than anyone has ever dared to go before him. You want less technical? Marnus will spend months in the nets with coaches and video clips, exhaustively remoulding himself into the least technical batter that has ever existed. This is simply the nature of the addict, and the trait that has always made Labuschagne one of the most wildly absorbing cricketers in the game.<\/p>\n Labuschagne has played his county cricket for Glamorgan. Photograph: Dan Mullan\/Getty<\/p>\n Perhaps before this inscrutably unpredictable Ashes series, there is even a kind of pleasing dissonance to Labuschagne\u2019s unquenchable obsession. In England we have a team for whom any kind of analysis, let alone self-analysis, is a kind of dangerous taboo. Feel the flavours. Be where the ball is. Smell the now.<\/p>\n In the other corner you have a player such as Labuschagne, a man terminally obsessed with cricket and magnificently unbothered by who knows about it, who sees cricket even in the spaces between the cricket, who treats this absurd sport with exactly the level of absurd reverence it demands.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Subscribe to our cricket newsletter for our writers’ thoughts on the biggest stories and a review of the week\u2019s action<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n And it worked. During his shamanic phase \u2013 from the moment he strode out to replace a concussed Steve Smith at Lord\u2019s in 2019 to around the end of 2022 \u2013 Labuschagne somehow managed to see the game more deeply. To access it \u2013 through sheer intensity of will \u2013 on a higher, weirder, more frenzied level. During his days playing Kent league cricket, teammates would find him on the morning of a game sitting on a park bench in a trance-like state, literally visualising every single ball of his innings. According to Cricviz, during the first few years of his career a statistically unfathomable proportion of catches were dropped off his bat. Somehow Labuschagne had intuited what would happen before anyone had a chance to influence it.<\/p>\n Perhaps this was why his career began to disintegrate the moment he reached the summit. There were no worlds left to visualise, just a boundless, uncharted void before his eyes. Also \u2013 to be fair \u2013 he stopped trusting his cover drive, got stuck in his crease and seemed to forget where his off-stump was. But it\u2019s all the same thing, really. Meanwhile his coach, Neil D\u2019Costa, reckons a focus on white-ball cricket started to erode confidence in his alignment. Good news: he\u2019s just been dropped from the 50-over squad.<\/p>\n Surely it matters, too, that Labuschagne is a man of deep religious faith, an evangelical Christian who believes that this is all basically written out in advance, who thus sees his job as one of accessing this state of flow, however enigmatic and inexplicable it may appear to the mortal of us.<\/p>\n This, to my mind, has always been the main point of difference between him and Smith, a more naturally gifted player and a similar character to Labuschagne in so many ways. Smith tries to know the game; Labuschagne tries to harness the unknowable. Smith wants to define what\u2019s coming; Labuschagne simply wants to be there, because it\u2019s already happened.<\/p>\n And because we can all access this flow state, you will surely have foreseen how we were going to finish. Why does Labuschagne want his cheese toastie cold? I have two theories. One comes down to visualisation. He wants to spend time seeing the sandwich in his mind before he eats it: trusting the process, relishing the process. But also, I think, there\u2019s something in the sandwich itself that appeals to him. You can cool melted cheese, but you can never put it back to the way it was. You can put toast in the fridge, but it remains toast. Something in their shared journey has changed them fundamentally and for ever. We are all pebbles in a river, products of a current and, as much as we may wish it to be, the river never flows upwards.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Marnus Labuschagne carefully spreads butter on both sides of a slice of white bread. \u201cThat\u2019s the key,\u201d he…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":199781,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[564],"tags":[64,63,740,85],"class_list":["post-199780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cricket","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-cricket","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199780\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/199781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}