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Labuschagne methodically applies butter on each surface of a slice of soft bread. “That’s the secret,” he states as he lowers the lid of his sandwich grill. “There you go. Then you get it golden on each side.” He lifts the lid to reveal a perfectly browned of ideal crispiness, the bubbling cheese happily melting inside. “And that’s the trick of the trade,” he declares. At which point, he does something unexpected and strange.

By now, I sense a layer of boredom is beginning to form across your eyes. The alarm bells of overly fancy prose are flashing wildly. You’re no doubt informed that Labuschagne made 160 runs for Queensland this week and is being feverishly talked up for an Australian Test recall before the England-Australia contest.

No doubt you’d prefer to read more about his performance. But first – you now grasp with irritation – you’re going to have to sit through three paragraphs of playful digression about grilled cheese, plus an additional unnecessary part of tiresome meta‑deconstruction in the “you” perspective. You feel resigned.

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

Back to Cricket

Okay, to cut to the chase. How about we cover the sports aspect out of the way first? Quick update for your patience. And while there may still be six weeks until the initial match, Labuschagne’s hundred against the Tasmanian side – his third of the summer in various games – feels importantly timed.

Here’s an Aussie opening batsmen badly short of performance and method, shown up by South Africa in the Test championship decider, highlighted further in the following Caribbean tour. Labuschagne was left out during that tour, but on one hand you sensed Australia were eager to bring him back at the earliest chance. Now he appears to have given them the perfect excuse.

And this is a plan that Australia need to work. The opener has one century in his last 44 knocks. The young batsman looks less like a Test opener and rather like the attractive performer who might act as a batsman in a Bollywood epic. No other options has shown convincing form. Nathan McSweeney looks finished. Harris is still inexplicably hanging around, like moths or damp. Meanwhile their skipper, Cummins, is unfit and suddenly this feels like a weirdly lightweight side, short of strength or equilibrium, the kind of effortless self-assurance that has often helped Australia dominate before a match begins.

Labuschagne’s Return

Step forward Marnus: a leading Test player as just two years ago, freshly dropped from the 50-over squad, the right person to restore order to a fragile lineup. And we are advised this is a calmer and more meditative Labuschagne now: a pared-down, no-frills Labuschagne, less intensely fixated with minor adjustments. “I feel like I’ve really stripped it back,” he said after his hundred. “Less focused on technique, just what I should make runs.”

Clearly, nobody truly believes this. Probably this is a new approach that exists only in Labuschagne’s own head: still endlessly adjusting that technique from dawn to dusk, going more back to basics than any player has attempted. Prefer simplicity? Marnus will take time in the training with advisors and replays, completely transforming into the simplest player that has ever been seen. This is just the trait of the obsessed, and the trait that has long made Labuschagne one of the most wildly absorbing cricketers in the sport.

Bigger Scene

Perhaps before this very open Ashes series, there is even a type of appealing difference to Labuschagne’s unquenchable obsession. On England’s side we have a squad for whom any kind of analysis, especially personal critique, is a risky subject. Feel the flavours. Focus on the present. Embrace the current.

For Australia you have a batsman like Labuschagne, a man completely dedicated with cricket and wonderfully unconcerned by who knows about it, who observes cricket even in the moments outside play, who approaches this quirky game with exactly the level of quirky respect it demands.

His method paid off. During his shamanic phase – from the time he walked out to replace a concussed the senior batsman at the famous ground in 2019 to around the end of 2022 – Labuschagne found a way to see the game on another level. To access it – through pure determination – on a different, unusual, intense plane. During his days playing English county cricket, colleagues noticed him on the day of a match positioned on a seat in a meditative condition, mentally rehearsing all balls of his innings. According to cricket statisticians, during the initial period of his career a statistically unfathomable proportion of catches were missed when he batted. Somehow Labuschagne had intuited what would happen before anyone had a chance to affect it.

Form Issues

It’s possible this was why his performance dipped the point he became number one. There were no worlds left to visualise, just a unknown territory before his eyes. Additionally – he stopped trusting his cover drive, got stuck in his crease and seemed to misjudge his positioning. But it’s all the same thing. Meanwhile his mentor, Neil D’Costa, reckons a focus on white-ball cricket started to undermine belief in his technique. Encouragingly: he’s just been dropped from the one-day team.

No doubt it’s important, 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 achieving this peak performance, however enigmatic and inexplicable it may look to the mortal of us.

This mindset, to my mind, has long been the key distinction between him and the other batsman, a inherently talented player