The World Test Championship final was ‘kill or cure’ for Marnus Labuschagne, I wrote two weeks ago. It did not go well. Mark Taylor thinks he should ‘take a break’. He is to get one - of a kind anyway. He’ll be a newly thirty-one-year-old supernumerary in the Caribbean, as Zoomer poster child Sam Konstas gets another chance.
This is News, in a way it once was not. We have stuck rather than twisted so long that any Australian line-up change seems momentous. He’s ‘scared’! He needs ‘love’! First he was ‘axed’, now he’s in the nets! Chief selector George Bailey, watching all this in Bridgetown, might reflect that his own Test career ended with but little fuss when he averaged 26 in five Tests in 2013-14; Labuschagne has gone sixteen Tests since his last hundred, averaging 24.7. The foregone opportunities that Labuschagne will rue were the back-to-back Tests at Galle, when others gathered runs as winter-wise squirrels gather nuts. He poked at one as Usman Khawaja, Steve Smith and Josh Inglis got big hundreds, then was lbw cheaply as Smith (again) and Alex Carey got big hundreds. That left him in the last chance saloon in a new slot in a big final - hardly a formula for success.
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