Rather than just breaking back into the Australian test team, Marnus Labuschagne is set to enter the Ashes as the form batter of either side after scoring his fifth century of the Australian season on Monday.<\/p>\n
His return is set to be confirmed in coming days when Australian selectors name their Ashes squad, after the 31-year-old was dropped for the tour of the West Indies in July.<\/p>\n
Labuschagne hit 101 off 111 deliveries for Queensland in their 50-over victory over NSW on Monday at Sydney\u2019s Cricket<\/a> Central. It is his third century in four innings in that competition, adding to another two in four innings in the Sheffield Shield.<\/p>\n Combined, he has scored nearly 700 runs in his eight visits to the crease this season, and appears to have put several years of struggle behind him. Labuschange said he feels he needed to be dropped for him to rediscover his form.<\/p>\n Marnus Labuschagne\u2019s first class average over the last 12 seasons<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cWhile you\u2019re still playing and you\u2019re in, you\u2019re getting scrutinised, and it\u2019s hard to get clarity on where you want your game to be and how you want to do that,\u201d he told Fox Sports.<\/p>\n \u201cAs a player, and the way I always play is \u2018OK, I\u2019ll just keep training. I\u2019ll keep training\u2019 and it was just not the right plan and the right play.<\/p>\n \u201cSo for me, it was something that really needed to happen for me to, like I said, find my best, and I said it from the start before the first game, \u2018if I\u2019m playing at my best, I don\u2019t need to worry about anything else\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n Marnus Labuschagne\u2019s Test average<\/a><\/p>\n When asked if he was in the form of his life, Labuschagne said: \u201cThe only one I can think of is probably 2019 at Glamorgan as a period of time. But probably not across both formats.<\/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 \u201cWith both formats I feel like my batting is in a really nice place, just trusting my skills and trusting myself out there … It\u2019s all coming together.\u201d<\/p>\n On Monday, Labuschagne got the better of another Ashes hopeful, Sam Konstas, who was caught behind for 47. But the Queenslander praised his former Australian teammate after the match.<\/p>\n \u201cI feel when he really learns his game \u2013 learns when to push, when to pull, when defend, when to use all these shots \u2013 he\u2019s going to be a very, very good player for Australia,\u201d Labuschagne said.<\/p>\n Australia\u2019s Ashes squad is expected to be announced this week ahead of the first Test in Perth beginning on 21 November.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rather than just breaking back into the Australian test team, Marnus Labuschagne is set to enter the Ashes…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":242583,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[1721,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-242582","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cricket","8":"tag-cricket","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242582","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242582"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242582\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/242583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}