by A few years ago, I was on a late morning train from Brighton to London, luxuriating in the holy trinity of a silent carriage and an empty table seat with a working power outlet. I had done this thing where I scattered my things around to try to make it look like I had company who might have just gone to the bathroom, the better to prevent anyone from sitting near me. I’m not a monster, the rest of the car was completely empty, Your Honor.
With the laptop and notepad open, I was preparing to do some work attempting the crossword from this newspaper when a figure dressed head to toe in black snuck into the seat opposite . With a mixture of confusion and fury, I stole a glance at the intruder in the window’s reflection. A shock of jet black hair above an avalanche of forehead, nostrils flared like two trash can lids, sunglasses perched on a low shirt, more sparkly on the fingers than Bobby George or even Amol Rajan.
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It was Nick Cave.
Now, this is a cricket column (we’ll get to that), so the chapter and verse of the full encounter can wait for another day, but I will say that you feel very much alive battling a cryptic nifty G2 alongside the Great Lord of Gothic. Darkness. When the train arrived at Victoria Station, Cave fixed my eyes with his reptilian gaze and left me with the words “Keep the flame burning”. I can say that I think about that encounter and those four words often, a little more after watching Virat Kohli and Marnus Labuschagne bat in Perth.
Cave writes a lot about “keeping the flame alive.” In his work, it is a metaphor for creativity and ideas, for how these intangible things must be nurtured and coaxed from their earliest stages and kept burning throughout life.
“A little flame that you lean over and cut with your hand and pray will not be extinguished by all the storm that howls around it,” he drawls in his distinctive Antipodean baritone in his 2014 documentary, 20,000 Days on Earth. “If you can keep that flame alive, great things can be built around it.” »
Watching Labuschagne scratch and scratch on the biscuit-colored wicket at Optus Stadium last week was to see a man desperately trying to keep his flame burning despite a strong wind. In this case, Cave’s flame is the form. In cricket, form is the thing by which batters live and die, form is fickle and unknowable. In good times the form can be fought and exploited and in bad times it can seem so out of reach that it barely exists.
Labuschagne was dropped and scratched for two runs off 51 balls in the first Test against India before looking helpless against a straight delivery from Mohammed Siraj. During his second innings, he then offered further insight into his scrambled mind by letting a delivery from Jasprit Bumrah go towards his pads in front of the stumps, knocking him down and leaving him momentarily sprawled on all fours, looking like at a pub. -drunkard who spilled his money on the carpet at the crucial moment.
Labuschagne is in the worst form of his international career. His test average went from a three-year stretch in the 60s early to 24.50 this year. He scored 123 runs in his last 10 shots, including 90 in a single inning. He looks awfully out of touch, grabbing and fumbling at the crease; the histrionics that once seemed to fuel his sleeves now have an air of distraction and despair. “NO RACING.” Well, indeed.
The flame of Labuschagne clings to its wick. Failure lurks in every delivery, even if you wouldn’t necessarily guess it from his demeanor on the field, where Marnus, on the mic, oscillates between braggadocio bachelor party, chatterbox and party-loving toddler who squeezes the hems and jumps on the numbers of a delivery. to the next one.
All hitters suffer from dips in form, a true blue flame can wither to the size of a match head seemingly without rhyme or reason. Labuschagne was no doubt relieved to see Kohli attempt to restore his own fire after the Indian great scored his first Test ton since July 2023. While Kohli once swept all before him like a raging bushfire, his last 35 Test matches have seen him smoldering at an average of under 33.
Nowadays, international teams around the world are full of Test batters averaging in the 30s. Something Ricky Ponting and his father would probably thumb their noses at. Ponting’s 2011 quote that “if you were an average of 35 years old when I played, your dad would go buy you a basketball or a soccer ball and tell you to play that” was recently re-shared on social media by Kevin Pietersen with the words “DONE”. Both men were perhaps guilty of donning rose-colored glasses rather than the microscope when it came to their own form, having suffered significant losses of form in 2001 and 2010 respectively.
England begin their Test series against New Zealand with Ben Stokes, Zak Crawley and Ollie Pope all averaging in the 30s and all having a tough time. Jacob Bethell is expected to bat at No. 3 and will make his Test debut without having scored a professional century. England threw him the biggest punt of the Bazball era because they think he’s a future great in the making and, more importantly, he’s on fire, fitness-wise. Whatever happens, he would do well to watch and learn from the man below him in the batting order. Playing his 150th Test and with an average of over 50, Joe Root knows how to keep the flame alive.
