Attention England: terminally obsessed Marnus Labuschagne has gone back to basics | Jonathan Liew

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

I can already feel a glaze of boredom starting to form over your eyes. The red lights of sportswriting pretense are flashing wildly. You are probably aware that Labuschagne scored 160 for Queensland this week and is being feverishly called for a recall for the Australian Test before the Ashes.

You probably want to read more about that. But first – you now realize with an anguished sigh – you’ll have to sit through three paragraphs of wobbly whimsy about grilled cheese sandwiches, plus an extra unwanted bonus paragraph of tiresome meta-deconstruction in the second person. You sigh again.

Labuschagne throws the sandwich on a plate and walks to the refrigerator. “Not many people do this,” he announces, “but I actually like cold toastie. Boom, in the fridge. You let that cheese harden, take a puff and come back. Boom. Toastie’s ready to go.”

Look, let’s try it this way. How about we get the cricket part out of the way first? A 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 Australian top three seriously lacking in form and structure, which was showcased by South Africa in the World Test Championship final and then shown again in the Caribbean. Labuschagne was dropped on that tour, but on some level you felt Australia were desperate to rehabilitate him at the first opportunity. Now he seems to have given them the perfect excuse.

And this is a plan that Australia needs to work. Usman Khawaja has one century in his last 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 produced a convincing argument. Nathan McSweeney looks cooked. Marcus Harris still inexplicably hangs around, like moths or damp. Meanwhile, their captain, Pat Cummins, gets injured and suddenly this feels like a strangely lightweight team, lacking authority or poise, the kind of effortless confidence that has often put Australia 2-0 ahead before a ball has been bowled.

Then you come across Marnus: a number 1 test hitter in the world who only appeared in 2023, having just fallen out of the over-50s squad, the perfect character to restore order to a fragile empire. And we are told that today this is a calmer and more meditative Labuschagne: an understated, back-to-basics Labuschagne, no longer so maniacally obsessed with technical details. “I feel like I’ve really pulled it back,” he said after his century. “Not really too technical, just what I need to score points.”

Of course, no one really believes this. Most likely, this is a rebrand that exists entirely in Labuschagne’s own head: still furiously stripping that technique from dawn to dusk, going back to basics more than anyone before him ever dared to go. Do you want less technical? Marnus will spend months in the nets with coaches and video clips, exhaustingly transforming himself into the least technical hitter to ever exist. This is simply the nature of the addict, and the trait that has always made Labuschagne one of the most compelling cricketers in the game.

Perhaps before this unfathomably unpredictable Ashes series, there is even a kind of pleasant dissonance in Labuschagne’s unquenchable obsession. In England we have a team for whom any form of analysis, let alone self-analysis, is some kind of dangerous taboo. Feel the flavors. Be where the ball is. Smell it now.

In the other corner you have a player like Labuschagne, a man who is terminally obsessed with cricket and not at all concerned about who knows anything 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 time he stepped in at Lord’s in 2019 to replace concussed Steve Smith until around the end of 2022 – Labuschagne somehow managed to to see the game deeper. To access it – through sheer intensity of will – on a higher, stranger, more insane level. During his days playing Kent League cricket, teammates would find him sitting on a park bench in a trance-like state on the morning of a match, literally visualizing every ball of his innings. According to Cricviz, during the first few years of his career, a statistically unfathomable portion of catches were left out of his hands. Somehow Labuschagne had sensed what would happen before anyone had a chance to influence it.

Perhaps this was why his career started to fall apart as soon as he reached the top. There were no more worlds to visualize, only a boundless, unknown void before his eyes. Plus, to be honest, he didn’t rely on his cover drive anymore, got stuck in his crease and seemed to forget where his off-stump was. But really it’s all the same. Meanwhile, his coach, Neil D’Costa, believes a focus on white-ball cricket is starting to undermine confidence in his setup. Good news: he has just been removed from the selection of over-50s.

It certainly also matters that Labuschagne is a man of deeply religious faith, an evangelical Christian who believes that this is all basically written out in advance, and who thus sees his task as one of accessing this state of flow, however mysterious and inexplicable it may seem to the mortals among us.

This, in my opinion, has always been the main point of difference between him and Smith, a more naturally gifted player and in many ways a similar character to Labuschagne. Smith is trying to learn the game; Labuschagne tries to exploit the unknowable. Smith wants to define what’s to come; Labuschagne just wants to be there, because it has already happened.

And since we all have access to this power state, you will surely have foreseen how we would end up. Why does Labuschagne want his cheese toastie cold? I have two theories. One comes down to visualization. He wants to spend time seeing the sandwich in his head before he eats it: trusting the process, enjoying the process. But I also think there’s something about the sandwich itself that appeals to him. You can cool melted cheese, but you can never put it back the way it was. You can put toast in the refrigerator, but it’s still toast. Something about their shared journey has fundamentally and forever changed them. We are all pebbles in a river, products of a current, and no matter how much we want it to be, the river never flows upward.