If you were to bioengineer a cricketer in a laboratory, which attributes would you give them? You would make them tall, with long limbs and a whiplash action to extract steep bounce. Add speed, movement both ways and a left arm to offer a point of difference.
With the bat, make sure they can whack sixes but also go down the gears when an innings starts to unravel. For an added trait, have them catch meteorites in the outfield and the cordon. You might end up with Marco Jansen.
At the start of the third Test, the 6ft 8in South African had taken 99 Test wickets at 20.81. His 85 against Australia at Gqeberha in the second Test came after South Africa had slumped to 110 for six before his counterattack helped turn a precarious position into an innings victory. Jansen is still developing as a batter, but his 25.66 average before this current Test understates his potential.
Jansen belongs to a great South African tradition. The country’s finest sides have often been built around players who can do more than one job. Mike Procter, Shaun Pollock, Lance Klusener and Jacques Kallis, who scored 13,289 Test runs and took 292 wickets, came to embody the quintessential South African cricketer.
That heritage continues in Jansen and Wiaan Mulder, whose wobble-seam bowling comes with the capacity to make 367 not out. But what makes someone an all-rounder? A recent essay by the analyst Jarrod Kimber argues that “a true all-rounder is not just their numbers, it is the effect they have on the entire team”.
The tidy statistical definition, in which a player’s batting average exceeds their bowling average, is inadequate. By that measure Joe Root and Don Bradman qualify. The more useful question is whether a player could be selected for either skill.
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