Marnus Labuschagne has been putting the glamour into Glamorgan since 2019, but still there is something slightly hallucinatory about finding the world’s best Test batter at Sophia Gardens. Yet here he sits, snacking on biltong – you can take the kid out of South Africa and all that – while overlooking the outfield at the end of a day’s play, a few weeks before Australia steal him away to join their Test squad for the Ashes and World Test Championship. “I love coming to Cardiff,” he says. “I love the people, I love the club, my family loves being here. It’s kind of like a second home.”
His actual second home for the last couple of years was a Cardiff house shared with his Glamorgan and occasional international teammate Michael Neser, who like Labuschagne was born in South Africa, moved to Australia as a child (Neser was nine, Labuschagne a year older) and settled in Queensland. But now he has a baby, so it didn’t seem like such a good idea. “We’re staying right across the road from each other, literally opposite,” Labuschagne says. “It’s really nice to share the experience, to have been able to share this journey with someone else, a really close friend.” These days, though, Neser is not the only one of those he has here: “I’ve played with these guys for four years. We’re good friends, our wives, kids – you know, you’re building real relationships and a culture and a great feeling.”
He says this to point out a contrast with the lifestyles of those cricketers who choose a more itinerant, franchise-focused path, vaulting from continent to continent, dressing room to dressing room. “I mean, I haven’t been on that journey,” he says, “but it can probably be one that’s a bit lonelier.”
Labuschagne does not seem drawn to the superficial. When he joins a club he stays not for weeks but for years, when he is interested in something he burrows deep into it. He is famously keen on coffee, but not the occasional Costa takeaway: the coffee machine in his flat costs as much as a second-hand car, and he has a business selling mail-order beans across Australia. “I’m very passionate about cricket. I spend a lot of my spare time thinking about how I can get better, ways I can do things, trying to expand how I can play, what I can do,” he says. “With coffee it’s like a passion – I want to know how to make a really nice coffee, but I want to know about the beans, the flavours. I don’t want to say I have an addictive personality, but I certainly love going down that rabbit hole, thinking how good can I possibly be at that one thing, no matter what it is.”
At the one thing he does for a living he has become extraordinary, but when Glamorgan first signed him it was to little fanfare. Then 24, he had played five Tests and already ticked off every batting position from three to seven, scoring one half-century. His Test ranking stood at 110, his first-class average a shade under 32. But in his first County Championship game he produced an innings of 121; in his second one of 137; in his fourth one of 182. “When I first came over I’d had a pretty poor finish to the season at home,” he remembers. “So it was just about playing more first-class cricket, getting more opportunities to keep getting better as a player, and the bonus was there was an Ashes at the end. But I was probably a fair way out of the mixer at that stage.”
When an injury to Steve Smith made Australia seek the sport’s first concussion substitute midway through the second Test of that summer, Labuschagne stepped in. He scored a half-century in that match at Lord’s, and then another in his next innings, and another, and another. By late 2019 he was ranked No 4 in the world, and by the end of 2021 he was No 1. “I always believed in my ability,” he says, “but I think to get to this level you need so many things to fall in the right place. There’s no real way I can explain how it all unfolded so perfectly leading into those Ashes, how everything just came to a point. Now I look at it and think it’s a bit unbelievable, the way things have panned out.”
Labuschagne has largely forsaken T20 cricket – though he says he “would love to play in the IPL” and is “always thinking about going back in the auction” – but he has no concern about the rising tide of franchise cricket submerging Tests altogether. “Obviously there’s more pathways for young players now,” he says. “Not every pathway for a young cricketer is: ‘I want to represent my country.’ It might be: ‘I want to play in the IPL.’ But I don’t think that’s for everyone, right? There’s a small margin of players that can go down that path and the unfortunate thing about that path is it drops off very quickly. You have a couple of bad tournaments and, all of a sudden, who are you contracted to? But it comes down to each to their own. If money is the driver and people see that they can earn more playing white-ball rather than Test cricket, then people are going to take that route. But I certainly don’t think that’s going to be for everyone.”
Besides, Test cricket is fun, right? “In the last three, four years it’s been unbelievable. It’s been so entertaining,” he says. “The 2019 Ashes was an unbelievable series. Australia v India in Australia, really good series. We just had a pretty good series in India on some diabolical turning wickets and then you go New Zealand v England, Pakistan v England. I mean, the game’s coming alive. So it’s going to be an entertaining summer.”
after newsletter promotion
Australia play India in the World Test Championship final at the Oval next week before rolling straight into the Ashes, starting at Edgbaston on 16 June. Since being thrashed in Australia 18 months ago England have been rejuvenated, but perhaps enough has been seen of their new approach for opponents to start figuring out the faultlines. “England were at the stage where they just needed to find a new method and they just needed a shake up,” Labuschagne says. “And whenever something new comes on board, people don’t necessarily know how to react. Like anything, the more they play a certain way, people are going to be able to read it and come up with plans and ways to negate that method. At the end of the day, time will tell if that’s a method that’s going to be upstanding, or if it is not. But I’m not here to question England’s method – on paper it’s worked very well.”
Labuschagne’s own method is perhaps a little more sober but it has certainly been upstanding. “When I went out to play that first innings [in 2019] I just thought: ‘This is a free hit – people aren’t expecting much from me here,’” he says, but there are no free hits when you’re the world’s No 1 Test batter. “Yeah, people are expecting me to score runs more consistently now, but it’s just about not letting that get to you, focusing on one ball at a time and trying to stick to the process. As soon as you get too fixated on runs and needing to score and have to, have to, have to, you find yourself searching for it and that’s when you start not having success. It’s about trusting your game.”
Labuschagne has taken no shortcuts on his way to establishing that trust. He is renowned as a workaholic, fuelled by the desire to just go out there and play, as often and as successfully as possible (and also by coffee). “I get to do what I love. I get to do what I dreamt of when I was three years old,” he says. “And, you know, being able to live that dream is a big privilege. I think the day you forget that and take it for granted is probably the day that it slips through your hands.”
