A few years ago I was on a late-morning train from Brighton to London luxuriating in the holy trinity of a quiet carriage and an empty table seat with a working plug socket. I’d done that thing where I’d spread my possessions out in an attempt to make it look like I had company who had perhaps just nipped off to the loo, all the better to ward off anyone from sitting near me. I’m not a monster, the rest of the carriage was completely empty, your honour.
With laptop and notebook open I was gearing up to doing some work by attempting this paper’s crossword when a figure clad head to toe in black sidled into the seat opposite. With a mixture of confusion and fury coursing, I snuck a look at the interloper in the reflection of the window. A shock of jet black hair on top of an avalanche of forehead, flared nostrils like two bin lids, sunglasses perched on low slung shirt, more bling on his fingers than Bobby George or even Amol Rajan.
It was Nick Cave.
Now, this is a cricket column (we’ll get there) so the chapter and verse of the full encounter can wait for another day but I will say that you do feel quite alive grappling with a tricksy G2 cryptic alongside the Grand Lord of Gothic Darkness. When the train pulled into Victoria Station, Cave fixed my eyes with his reptilian stare and left me with the words “Keep the flame burning”. Safe to say I often think of that encounter and those four words, a little more so after watching Virat Kohli and Marnus Labuschagne bat in Perth.
Cave writes about “nurturing the flame” a lot. In his line of work it is a metaphor for creativity and ideas, how these intangible things must be cared for and cajoled in their early stages and kept burning across a lifetime.
“A little flame that you hunch over and cup with your hand and pray will not be extinguished by all the storm that howls about it,” he drawls in his distinctive antipodean baritone in his 2014 documentary, 20,000 Days on Earth. “If you can hold on to that flame, great things can be constructed around it.”
Watching Labuschagne scritch and scratch about on the biscuit-coloured wicket at the Optus Stadium last week was to see a man desperately trying to keep his flame burning in the teeth of a gale. In this instance, Cave’s flame is form. In cricket, form is the thing that batters live and die by, form is fickle and unknowable. In good times form can be wrangled and harnessed and in bad it can appear to be so out of reach as to barely exist at all.
Labuschagne scrapped and scraped to two runs off 51 balls in the first Test against India before looking clueless to a straight delivery from Mohammed Siraj. In his second innings he then offered a further glimpse into his scrambled mind by leaving a delivery from Jasprit Bumrah that arrowed into his pads slap bang in front of the stumps, knocking him off his feet and momentarily leaving him sprawled on all fours resembling a pub-drunk who has spilt his coppers on to the carpet at the crucial moment.
Labuschagne is in the worst form of his international career. His Test average has tanked from a three-year period in the 60s at the start to 24.50 this year. He has made 123 runs in his past 10 knocks, 90 of which came in one innings. He looks woefully out of touch, grasping and groping at the crease; the histrionics that once seemed to fuel his innings now have the air of distraction, desperation. “NO RUN.” Well, indeed.
Labuschagne’s flame clings to its wick. Failure lurks with every delivery, not that you would necessarily guess from his demeanour in the field, where a mic’d up Marnus veers between braggadocio stag-do shit-talker to hem-hugging party-toddler hopped up on e numbers from one delivery to the next.
All batters suffer dips in form, a flame burning blue and true can wilt to size of a matchhead seemingly without rhyme or reason. Labuschagne no doubt took some succour from watching Kohli going some way to restoring his own blaze after the Indian great scored his first Test ton since July 2023. Whereas Kohli once swept all before him like a raging scrub fire, his past 35 Test matches have seen him smoulder to an average a lick under 33.
Nowadays, international sides around the world are crammed with Test batters who average in the 30s. Something Ricky Ponting, and his dad, would probably cock a snook at. Ponting’s 2011 quote that “if you were averaging 35 when I was playing, your dad would go and buy you a basketball or a footy and tell you to play that” was recently reshared on social media by Kevin Pietersen with the words “FACT”. Both men were perhaps guilty of donning the rose-tinted specs 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 going through a lean patch. Jacob Bethell is due to bat at No 3 and will make his Test debut without having scored a professional century. England have taken the biggest punt of the Bazball era on him because they believe he is a future great in the making and, crucially, he is on fire, form wise. Whatever happens he would do well to look and learn from the man below him in the batting order. Playing his 150th Test and averaging more than 50, Joe Root knows how to keep the flame burning.
This is an extract from the Guardian’s weekly cricket email, The Spin. To subscribe, just visit this page and follow the instructions.
