Inside the mind of Marnus: What changed in 10 days of tinkering

Marnus Labuschagne did not have to read the headlines after the end of the first Test to understand change was required. From the Australian camp, there were public and private urgings for him to show more willingness to score against India's vaunted attack. Prominent former players were saying the same.

Labuschagne did not necessarily need any of that to know he needed a circuit-breaker to snap a dry spell that had seen him dismissed inside his first 30 balls in all but two of his previous nine innings, scoring more than 10 only once.

It prompted him to conduct a review on his own game the way a consultant might on a struggling business. Except Labuschagne had just 10 days to start turning a profit.

His Test spot on the line, he factored just one silver lining into this self-audit. In the first innings of the series opener, when Jasprit Bumrah and co. terrorised the right-hander in Perth's dying light, Labuschagne endured for more than an hour-and-a-half.

As painful as his 95-minute, 52-ball knock that featured half as many dropped catches as there were scoring shots, Labuschagne had batted for longer than in any of his previous 17 international innings, barring the 90 he made in March's second Test against New Zealand in Christchurch which increasingly looked like an outlier.

"At the end of the Perth Test, I knew I wasn't moving into the ball well," Labuschagne told cricket.com.au. "There were a lot of things I didn’t like about how I played.

"The positives I took out of it was (despite) my technique and how I was playing, I managed to last (nearly) 60 balls out in the middle. For me, I took a lot out of my ability to find a way."

Justin Langer, the man who thought the Queenslander would be a Test player before anyone, was one of the voices offering Labuschagne encouragement. Publicly, his former head coach cautioned against the perils of "paralysis by analysis".

But Labuschagne's rapid review saw him canvass the opinions of many. His batting mentor Neil D'Costa and Australia's batting coach Michael di Venuto were the most notable.

Who else's counsel did Labuschagne seek? "Too many people," he said. "A lot of people. I wanted to get a gauge on different things."

He pored over footage of himself batting. With Di Venuto, Labuschagne identified the areas he needed to change. At its core, the tweaks were about shifting his weight into the ball more, necessitating a shift in his pre-ball trigger movement across his stumps.

"It took all week really to try and work on different things, find out if that worked, and keep filtering through until I found out what I needed to," he said.

"The 10 days off was about trying to reconnect moving into the ball, lining the ball up nicely and finding out where I was missing the link there.

"I was hitting day after day for nine days straight, just finding a way to get back to where I wanted to be.

"That was the journey I started on Tuesday and I wanted to make sure that when I got here in Adelaide that I was able to be in a position to trust it and go out and play."

To the naked eye, the changes are hardly visible. For Labuschagne, whose tinkering with his batting method has become as much of a trademark as his cry of "no run!", his new movements felt significant.

"The things I changed were more pre-ball," he explained. "It was my pre-ball set-up and getting a better alignment there, getting my head pushing more forward. They were all things before my trigger.

"I've batted so many different ways over the last four or five years so for me it was about which way I want to get back to – and reconnecting that with my new stance.

"It wasn't as difficult as it may sound, but it was just for me to find out, 'Okay I'm going to do this trigger, I'm going to set up like this and lining the ball up really well and get myself in a really good position'."

Labuschagne's first chance at implementing the modifications in the heat of battle came in strikingly similar circumstances to the ones he had begun his tortured hand in Perth a fortnight earlier.

India once again had failed to post a notable first-innings total but were now bowling in the most favourable conditions of the day.

It took Labuschagne 18 balls to score a run. Bumrah, sensing his prey at a low ebb, virtually danced in delight after going past his outside edge before he had scored. But Labuschagne was not the same sitting duck India saw in Perth.

By stumps he had found the rope three times and found an equally resilient ally in Nathan McSweeney. The pair ensured just a solitary wicket had fallen in the dangerous night session.

When Travis Head arrived to post his customary Adelaide Test century the following afternoon, India's ball was 40 overs old. At the same point in Australia's first innings in the Perth Test, they had lost nine wickets.

"That was really gutsy what those guys did on that first night," captain Pat Cummins said of Labuschagne and McSweeney's efforts in Adelaide.

"You look back to Perth and it's those small moments … I think it was a really good lesson. That was super gutsy to get through that period and it meant that some of the other guys later on could cash in."

NRMA Insurance Men's Test Series v India

First Test: India won by 295 runs

Second Test: Australia won by 10 wickets

Third Test: December 14-18: The Gabba, Brisbane, 11.20am AEDT

Fourth Test: December 26-30: MCG, Melbourne, 10.30am AEDT

Fifth Test: January 3-7: SCG, Sydney, 10.30am AEDT

Australia squad (for second Test): Pat Cummins (c), Sean Abbott, Scott Boland, Alex Carey (wk), Brendan Doggett, Josh Hazlewood, Travis Head, Josh Inglis, Usman Khawaja, Marnus Labuschagne, Nathan Lyon, Mitch Marsh, Nathan McSweeney, Steve Smith, Mitchell Starc, Beau Webster

India squad: Rohit Sharma (c), Jasprit Bumrah (vc), Yashasvi Jaiswal, KL Rahul, Abhimanyu Easwaran, Devdutt Padikkal, Shubman Gill, Virat Kohli, Rishabh Pant, Sarfaraz Khan, Dhruv Jurel, Ravichandran Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja, Mohammed Siraj, Akash Deep, Prasidh Krishna, Harshit Rana, Nitish Kumar Reddy, Washington Sundar. Reserves: Mukesh Kumar, Navdeep Saini, Khaleel Ahmed, Yash Dayal