Marnus Labuschagne's golden years and the gap in the cordon

Marnus Labuschagne made 14 and 39 at St George's Park, and he has not made a Test hundred since the 2023 Ashes. As the calls to drop him grow louder, an older charge has come back with them: he was never truly great, and the four years that made his name were luck.

Luck leaves a trail in false shots, the balls a batter edged, missed or mistimed. Count each false shot at the rate such shots got top-order Test batters out that year, against the same kind of bowling, and you get the runs per dismissal his false shots predict. Set that against the runs he actually made per dismissal by a bowler, with run outs left out, and the luck shows up as the gap.

From 2019 to 2022 Labuschagne made 67.9 runs per dismissal, while his false shots predicted 50.9. That was the biggest gap among the 17 top-order Test batters who faced the most balls in men's Tests in those years. So the sceptics have their luck, and the question is what was left underneath it.

Was Labuschagne's peak real?

It was. On his false shots alone he ranked fourth of those batters, a fraction behind Steve Smith, the benchmark of that era, at 51.2. Put another way, his edges and misses said he was batting about as well as anyone in the world.

The reason was how rarely he got it wrong. He played a false shot on 12.6% of the balls he faced, against 15.6% for top-order batters.

That is the part of the record luck cannot touch. A batter's false-shot rate holds steady from one set of Tests to the next, so it belongs to the batter. How often those false shots get him out barely repeats at all, which makes it mostly chance. Labuschagne's low false-shot rate was skill, and the extra runs he stacked on top of it were fortune.

Where the luck sat

Most of the fortune came against pace outside off stump, the channel where careers at No. 3 are made and broken. In 2019-22 he made 71.4 runs per dismissal there, while his false shots in that channel predicted 38.1.

Edges that might have carried to the slips kept finding the gap in the cordon. Since 2023 that gap has closed, and more besides: he has made 22.4 runs per dismissal outside off against pace, short of the 27.8 his false shots there predict.

What has changed since 2023?

The luck has evened out, and the batting has slipped. Since 2023 he has made 30.4 runs per dismissal, and his false shots predict 31.2. Of the 15 top-order batters who have faced the most balls in that time, he ranks last on both measures. His false-shot rate has risen to 16.9%, against 17.1% for top-order batters, so the man who once stood well clear of the field now edges and misses like one of the pack.

Against pace he is still a little tidier than the top order, though the margin he once had has mostly gone. Spin is where he has fallen furthest. He used to be safer than most against the slow bowlers, and now he plays a false shot on 14.4% of balls from spinners, against 12.3% for top-order batters. What his false shots predict against spin has collapsed with it.

Because the false-shot rate is the steady part of a batter's game, a rise like that means the batter himself has changed. It cannot be put down to a bad run of edges carrying.

Should Australia keep him at No. 3?

Pat Cummins and the selectors have kept backing him. In Durban he made 37 twice in a Test Australia won, and over his whole career he has made 46.6 runs per dismissal against a predicted 41.6. That is the record of a very good Test batter who had one stretch of extraordinary fortune.

The case for patience usually rests on the luck turning, and here it has little to stand on. His runs since 2023 sit almost exactly where his false shots say they should, so a kinder cordon would add only a few. The real problem is the batting those false shots describe, above all against spin. The sceptics are half right: luck did inflate the 2019-22 scores, but the batter underneath was level with Smith, and on any fair reading that is greatness.

The gap in the cordon gave Labuschagne's best years their shine, but the class behind them was real. That class has faded, and the gap will not open again to cover for it. Unless he starts edging and missing less, the backing at No. 3 is paying a debt to the batter he was in 2019, and the one at St George's Park has not earned it.