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What Marnus Labuschagne experienced in the Perth Test against India could easily be his worst episode in professional cricket.
Over 57 deliveries and five runs across two innings, the Australian batter saw his pride and pedigree wrung out of him by the Indian pacers, as his side collapsed to a crushing 295-run win.
Labuschagne’s shuffle across the stumps, the lifeblood of his run-scoring method, proved to be the bane of his existence – Jasprit Bumrah and Mohammed Siraj trapped him in front using sharp, full-length in-swingers.
It didn’t take too long for hordes of experts and fans to soon call for Labuschagne’s head, going into the Day-Night Test in Adelaide.
In fairness, this was not a knee-jerk reaction to the Perth ignominy. Over a year has passed since Labuschagne scored a hundred. In his last 10 Test innings, he registered seven single-digit scores.
But, just when the guillotine was about to be set in motion, Labuschage found his footing as he scored a patient, match-defining fifty in a comfortable Aussie win in the pink-ball Test in Adelaide last week.
A refurbished batting approach was key to his batting fortune reversal, highlighted by a subdued trigger movement across the stumps.
READ | Adelaide Test exposes India’s batting woes and over-reliance on Bumrah
“The things I changed were more pre-ball. It was my pre-ball set-up and getting a better alignment there, getting my head pushing more forward. They were all things before my trigger,” said Labuschagne in an interview with Cricket Australia.
Labuschagne’s knock though was largely overshadowed by yet another bashing-the-men-in-blue knock by Travis Head on Day 2.
But, Head’s onslaught was enabled in no small part by the way Labuschagne countered the Indian pace attack in the third session of Day 1, during the dreaded twilight period.
Under fading lights, Labuschagne left 37.3% of all the balls he faced as he curbed his run-scoring instincts. He was also aided in no small part by the exaggerated wide line adopted by the Indian quicks.
Labuschagne’s ability to leave the ball is central to his batting method. Since January 2019, among the top-10 Test run-getters, no batter has left the ball as often as him.
The Australian batter’s propensity to shoulder arms so often can be directly correlated to his scoring means. Labuschagne often forces bowlers to drift into his scoring zone, primarily down the leg side, by leaving a larger quantity of deliveries.
Among the earlier set of batters, Labuschagne has scored the second-least amount of runs on the off-side V (the area between third man and extra cover) and the most volume of runs in the leg-side V (the area between mid-wicket and long leg).
Employing this method, Labuschagne scaled run mountains at a furious pace, becoming an integral part of the Aussie batting unit. The South Africa-born batter recorded a 60+ batting average in three consecutive years (2019, 2020 and 2021) as he held down a place in the top four of the ICC Test batting ranking for over three years.
But, in professional sports, puzzles aren’t left unsolved for too long. Bowlers soon found a way to get the better of Labuschagne, plugging his primary run-scoring outlet and targeting his weakness outside off.
In 2022 and 2023, Labuschagne’s caught-behind dismissals spiked above 30%, while his false-shot per cent surged. His average time spent in the crease too dropped drastically, as indicated by his declining balls per dismissal.
Resultantly, his batting average collapsed from the heady 60s to 34.91 in 2023 and 28.09 in 2024. His career batting average dropped from 60.82 (in December 2022) to 48.63 right now.
But, just when one thought Labushchagne had hit his nadir, he found his salvation in Adelaide, where he has enjoyed batting (three hundreds and a fifty before this Test).
It also helped that the 30-year-old has thrived in pink-ball Tests, scoring more runs than anyone in such matches.
But, what enabled the Aussie batter the most was probably the 10-day gap between the first and second Border-Gavaskar Test, which he spent obsessing over his shortcomings.
“The 10 days off was about trying to reconnect moving into the ball, lining the ball up nicely and finding out where I was missing the link there. I was hitting day after day for nine days straight, just finding a way to get back to where I wanted to be,” said Labuschagne.
The output of this effort – a 126-ball 64 – has not just given Labuschagne a bit of breathing room but also offered him a new batting template to adhere to.
