Mackay: Close your eyes, feel the sea breeze on your face and smell the barbecued snags wafting across the ground, and Australia’s second Test against Bangladesh could almost be a stand-in for their first against South Africa.
Kingsmead in Durban, on South Africa’s eastern coast, is a good deal larger than Great Barrier Reef Arena, but its environs are not a million miles from Mackay.
From the point Mitchell Starc cut the Bangladesh top order to pieces with 6-12, and certainly once the recalled Shoriful Islam (6-35) gave a fine impersonation of Marco Jansen to keep the tourists in the game, it was hard not to start thinking of the long-awaited trip to meet the Proteas in October.
The dilemma for Australia right now is whether they can reasonably take the Klerksdorp-born Marnus Labuschagne across the Indian Ocean to enjoy the braai. On current evidence, he looks likely to be easy meat for Jansen, Kagiso Rabada, and Lungi Ngidi.
Before this game, coach Andrew McDonald and captain Pat Cummins played public bad cop and good cop with Labuschagne. McDonald stressed that he needed “big runs” in the aftermath of Australia’s surprising defeat in Darwin. Cummins then wrapped a rhetorical arm around Labuschagne by trying a version of the advice that appears to have worked for Cameron Green (51 not out), who made an overdue hundred last week and played fluently again here.
“As a bowler, it feels like the margins are really small when someone like Marnus or Steve [Smith] are at their best form,” Cummins had said. “I’ve felt that the last couple of months.
“Last week was a bit of a blip. Our message to Marnus is, ‘You don’t need to reinvent the wheel after last week’. Trust the work that he’s put in the last six months, because I think he’s in a really good place.”
The “blip” grew larger on Saturday afternoon, as Shoriful gave a good approximation of the questions Jansen might ask in Durban and proved be beyond the capacity of Labuschagne, Travis Head or Smith to counter.
Head has some thinking to do as well, after dragging one on for the third time in as many innings, but he has many more credits in the bank than Labuschagne, whose streak of lowish scores is now stretching longer than many whole Test careers have done.
Without a hundred since the Old Trafford Ashes Test in 2023, Labuschagne may well not bat again in this game, and there will be no Sheffield Shield games before the selectors sit down to choose their white- and red-ball squads for South Africa.
Always energetic, always thinking and always tinkering, Labuschagne seems unable to slow his mind down enough to return to the “zone” he enjoyed while churning out big scores consistently between 2019 and 2023.
Concentration issues and mental mistakes were central to the selectors’ thinking when they dropped Labuschagne in the West Indies last year, and it was hoped a strong run of Shield scores leading into the Ashes last summer had helped him regain equilibrium.
But with each low score and each new way to get out, this time losing leg stump via the protruding bottom of his thigh pad, Labuschagne has been unable to stop himself from making continual adjustments, even in the nets this week. There’s an argument to be made that he is struggling to remember what his best method actually looks like.
Simon Katich and Justin Langer, two former players with plenty of time for Labuschagne, sounded genuinely pained when trying to pin down the issues they could see from the Seven commentary box. It was left to their skipper Ricky Ponting to distil things.
“The worry that I had with him … I think he’s making the margin for error for the bowlers too great,” Ponting said. “With the length he can’t score off the back foot. He can’t score off the back foot in Test cricket. Batting becomes a hard game.
“That’s the great difference between when he was at his best, and we highlighted some graphics earlier though you know three or four years ago where he’s averaging 65-68 for a Test year. That was when he was scoring off front foot and back foot.
“I think the bowlers now know that they can run in and bowl anywhere from almost 10 metres to about four metres on off stump and out as wide as they want, and he can’t hurt them. So I well and truly think it’s time to have a look at somebody else.”
In the eight years since Australia’s infamous previous Test tour to South Africa, cricket has got demonstrably harder for batsmen.
The Kookaburra ball is hardier, the pitches are greener and bowlers are only getting fitter and more precise. Over that time, Labuschagne’s story has been a beguiling one, of a hard worker with enough talent to get to the top at a time when Australia needed him.
The biggest concern for the selectors may be that, having already brought him back from the outer once, doing so again would look a lot like the end of the line. And they have already jettisoned one member of the top three, Jake Weatherald, this week.
It would indeed be a sad irony if an immigrant from South Africa is unable to return to play Test cricket there. But as the wickets kept tumbling in Mackay, 18 in total, Australia’s leaders were left only with uncomfortable questions.
News, results and expert analysis from the weekend of sport sent every Monday. Sign up for our Sport newsletter.
Daniel Brettig is The Age’s chief cricket writer and the author of several books on cricket.Connect via X.From our partners
About the Author
