England beware: terminally obsessed Marnus Labuschagne has gone back to basics

arnus Labuschagne carefully spreads butter on both sides of a slice of white bread. “That’s the key,” he tells the camera as he brings down the lid of his sandwich grill. “Boom. Then you get it crisp on both sides.” He lifts the lid to reveal a golden square of pure toasted goodness, the melted cheese happily bubbling away inside. “So this is the trick of the trade,” he announces. At which point, he does something horrific and unspeakable.

Already, I sense, a glaze of ennui is beginning to form across your eyes. The red lights of sportswriting pretension are flashing wildly. You’re probably aware that Labuschagne scored 160 for Queensland this week and is being feverishly talked up for an Australian Test recall before the Ashes.

You probably want to read more about that. But first – you now realise with an anguished sigh – you’re going to have to sit through three paragraphs of wobbling whimsy about toasted sandwiches, plus an extra unwanted bonus paragraph of tiresome meta‑deconstruction in the second person. You sigh again.

Labuschagne flips the sandwich on to a plate and walks across to the fridge. “Not many people do this,” he announces, “but 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’s ready to go.”

Look, let’s 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’s century against Tasmania – his third of the summer in all cricket – feels quietly decisive.

This is an Australia© 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.

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 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.

Enter Marnus: a world No 1 Test batter as recently as 2023, freshly dropped from the 50-over squad, 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. “I feel like I’ve really stripped it back,” he said after his century. “Not really too technical, just what I need to score runs.”

Of course, nobody truly believes this. Most likely this is a rebrand that exists entirely in Labuschagne’s 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.

Perhaps before this inscrutably unpredictable Ashes series, there is even a kind of pleasing dissonance to Labuschagne’s 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.

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.

And it worked. During his shamanic phase – from the moment he strode out to replace a concussed Steve Smith at Lord’s in 2019 to around the end of 2022 – Labuschagne somehow managed to see the game more deeply. To access it – through sheer intensity of will – 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.

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 – to be fair – he stopped trusting his cover drive, got stuck in his crease and seemed to forget where his off-stump was. But it’s all the same thing, really. Meanwhile his coach, Neil D’Costa, reckons a focus on white-ball cricket started to erode confidence in his alignment. Good news: he’s just been dropped from the 50-over squad.

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.

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’s coming; Labuschagne simply wants to be there, because it’s already happened.

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’s 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.

[Source: The Guardian]