Marnus is in the grips of a cricket curse that once felled Sachin. It may already be too late

Greg Chappell has a theory about batsmen that he suspects applies perfectly to the lament Marnus Labuschagne is experiencing after the Queenslander’s double-despair in Gqeberha on Wednesday placed his career on a knife’s edge.

The former Australian captain has diagnosed the Queenslander, whose moment of madness when falling for a second time in a wretched day was symbolic of a man batting with a muddled mind, with “elite performance decline syndrome”.

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It has been a long-laboured point over the past three years, but the No.3 has now gone 47 innings without a Test hundred and is averaging 25 in that period. And as hard as the 31-year-old has been working, his symptoms fit Chappell’s theory.

Labuschagne is starting tentatively. An argument can be made to say he is over-thinking as he has tried to identify a solution to his malaise. And while he has made a notable intent to improve his proactiveness, it is not flowing naturally for him.

Both dismissals on Wednesday were a case in point, with the besieged No.3 out edging to slips in the first innings for 14 before a brain-fade in the second when teeing off into the face of a roaring gale while trying to clear Marco Jansen in the outfield.

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His anguish at the crease after throwing his wicket away with the loosest of shots when on 39 and batting to save the game, while well aware Steve Smith was stricken with a neck complaint, was the reaction of a tortured soul.

“Marnus is at the stage of his career that we all get to,” Chappell told foxsports.com.au at the SCG last month.

“What did I call it? I wrote an article: Elite Performance Decline Syndrome. You’ve got a finite number of innings in you and you sort of run out.

“I remember having a conversation when I took over India - Sachin rang me up one day and said, ‘Can I come and talk to you about batting?’ I said sure. So he said, ‘Why does batting get harder? Surely it should get easier.’ And I said, ‘Well, the problem is that you know too much. You’ve got too much history, and you know how hard batting at this level is.’

“When you’re younger, your mind’s uncluttered, and all you’re looking for is the ball and scoring runs, and then you start worrying about getting out. When you start worrying about getting out, your feet don’t move and you don’t get into the right position, so you don’t have many runs, many balls that you can score on.

“So if you want to resurrect your batting and you want to make it easier, then you’ve got to resurrect your thinking. You’ve got to start thinking like a young player. If you think like an old player, you’ll bat like an old player, and you won’t move, and you won’t get into good positions, and so the runs won’t come as easily, and you will get out easier.

“That’s the situation that Marnus is in at the moment, and until and unless he can reinvent that younger thinking, he’s going to struggle, and it’s a challenge for him.”

He may survive to Cape Town, but solely because Australia has too many flesh wounds to consider elsewhere after the carnage that unfolded elsewhere. But if Chappell’s diagnosis is right, his cause could be terminal.

Labuschagne has been given more rope than most. But Australian cricket has a history of culling batsman who lose their mind against the South Africans.

Consider Damien Martyn’s airborne cover drive off Allan Donald that led to a six-year exile from the Test team. Brad Hodge was bounced out of the team at the SCG in 2006 by another South African Andre Nel. This might be a Proteas hattrick.

Speaking after play, Australian coach Andrew McDonald acknowledged he had stressed repeatedly that Labuschagne needed to find a way to post a big score when set but that unfortunately the same scenario has continued occurring.

“I mean, you saw what we saw. For me, the option was there if the ball is in the right area - it is a strength of his - but in that scenario, as I said, there’s probably some shots that players want to take back,” he said.

“He did a lot of hard work once again, and it feels like I’m on repeat around the amount of 30s that he has got, and you would say that’s been a danger period for him.

“There was they had a good partnership going and (we were) starting to claw our way back into the game, albeit a long way behind the game obviously after the first innings disappointment, (but) for me, when you do that hard work, you’ve got to cash in and unfortunately that wasn’t to be the case for Marn.

“He’d be disappointed. We’re disappointed, and we find ourselves in this situation.”

Former Australian quick and ex-national selector Merv Hughes had hoped Labuschagne would arrive in South Africa and “slay them”, in part because he has talent, but also because no-one had been hammering the door down in Sheffield Shield.

But he was concerned that opposition sides had figured out the man who back in 2021 broke the stranglehold Smith, Virat Kohli, Kane Williamson and Joe Root had on being the world’s No.1 ranked Test batsman.

“Probably I look at that and the puzzling thing to me is that probably our batting is seen as a weakness, but what other batsmen have we brought in the squad to alleviate (it) if there’s a problem? So that’s the big thing for me,” Hughes said.

“People are calling for Marnus’s head, and people, well, Jake Weatherald’s been dropped, and Cameron Green more recently (was under pressure) before the Bangladesh tour.

“(The philosophy) is that we’ve got to be picking players that do well in Shield cricket. But when these guys go back to Shield cricket, they do well, and that’s why they’re getting picked.

“Marnus to me, and I haven’t spoken to Marnus, but Marnus to me looks like a man worried about what can go wrong rather than focusing on what he needs to do to score runs, so it’s almost as though he’s defensive before he starts, and he’s getting himself into bad positions.

“Marnus, a bit like Steve Smith when he comes out and he’s got all the movements, you just think he’s on. But probably in the last … six to 18 months we haven’t seen that and that coincides with the form drop.

“But the other thing about Marnus, too, is that he was a handful for a long time for a lot of sides, so sides adapt to different players, and at the moment they’re getting the better of Marnus.”

It is a point that Kayo Sports’ expert analysts Usman Khawaja and Kerry O’Keeffe agree with.

His former teammate Khawaja said Labuschagne, who has not enjoyed the glorious homecoming he would have dreamt of to the land of his birth, has not been able to adjust his technique enough.

“He doesn’t really play it late,” Khawaja said.

“You look at past dismissals, he comes out and slices it in front of his front pad. That’s the way he likes to play balls.”

It is a point made by an astute judge in South Africa who noted that when Labuschagne was snared by a brilliant catch by Simon Harmer in the slips off the bowling of Anrich Nortje, his left shoulder was pointing between mid-on and mid-wicket.

It is a flaw in his technique he has been trying to work on by having the shoulder pointing back down beyond the bowler’s approach after being dropped in the Caribbean but under immense pressure the old tic returns.

O’Keeffe said that continuing to play at deliveries outside the lines he once used to flourish in had been detrimental for him.

“Now he flirts so much on seventh or eighth stump (and) he’s nicking all the time,” O’Keeffe said on Kayo Sports.

Labuschagne knows it. The Australians know it. And so do the opposition, clearly.

“They’ve seen what the stats say and they’ve kind of honed that,” Khawaja said.

“At the start of his career, you’re not quite sure about how this guy bats (and) how he scores. He had a bit of luck too (with) a lot of dropped catches and he obviously made hay with that luck, which is what you have to do as a good batsman, not taking away any credit.

“But it’s the nuance of Test cricket. You score for a little while, but you can always stay doing the same things. Bowlers will figure out what your weaknesses are and hone in on that. Then you’ve got to keep evolving with it.”