Two Players in One: Marco Jansen and the Measure of an All-Rounder

The scoreboard read 110 for six when Marco Jansen walked into the Gqeberha evening. South Africa's innings had folded around him, and the match needed someone to turn pressure into shape. Jansen made 85. Six feet eight inches, left-arm pace, long levers at the crease: the image raised an old question in a new body. How many jobs can one cricketer do? I keep a separate notebook beside the scorecard when I watch Test cricket. Runs and wickets go on the page, and beside them I write what a player changed in the team's balance. Jansen's 85 sent me back to an old page where the word all-rounder sits with a question mark next to it. The numbers in this piece are the snapshot before the third Test. Jansen had 99 Test wickets at 20.81. His batting average was 25.66. The first figure says he is already a world-class fast bowler. The second says the batting story remains unfinished. South Africa's all-rounder lineage is usually drawn as a straight line: Mike Procter, Shaun Pollock, Lance Klusener, Jacques Kallis, Wiaan Mulder, Jansen. The names suggest a factory. The reality is a sequence of exceptions. Each player arrived with a different body, a different role, a different selectorial problem. Kallis is the emblem: 13,289 runs and 292 wickets. Those figures look like a single achievement. They are two decades of patience, training, changing batting positions and team responsibility. Cricket's favourite shortcut is the arithmetic test. If a player's batting average is higher than his bowling average, he is called an all-rounder. Joe Root passes that test. Don Bradman passes it. Neither would be picked primarily as a bowler. The test confuses a batter who bowls with a player who changes the team's structure. A genuine all-rounder can be selected for either skill. He lets a captain add a bowler without weakening the batting. He changes the balance, not merely the scorecard. Jarrod Kimber's point about the effect on the entire team gets closer to the truth. The definition is functional, and it is also subjective: team strength, pitch, era and selectorial philosophy all shape it. A player may be an all-rounder for a weak side and a specialist for a strong one. The rarity is measurable. Only 29 players have scored a century and taken five wickets in the same Test, across 41 performances. Ian Botham did it five times. The golden quartet of Botham, Richard Hadlee, Imran Khan and Kapil Dev each carried a different kind of double burden. Keith Miller scored 2,958 runs at 36.97 and took 170 wickets at 22.97. Alan Davidson made 1,328 runs and took 186 wickets at 20.53; in the 2026 tied Test he became the first player to score 100 runs and take 10 wickets in the same match. Garfield Sobers is remembered for six sixes, and his bowling variety is often remembered second. Australia produces fine all-rounders, rarely sustained ones. Andrew Symonds, Shane Watson, Mitchell Marsh, Cameron Green, Beau Webster: each offered a different balance, each struggled to remain indispensable in both skills at once. Australian selection culture likes clear categories. The all-rounder becomes a useful extra, not a primary identity. England's relationship with the all-rounder is romantic. Botham, Andrew Flintoff and Ben Stokes are remembered as much for mood as for numbers: the sudden storm, the counterattack, the sense that the match can turn in an over. That heroic silhouette can cast a long shadow. Sam Curran is a left-arm bowler and an inventive batter, a player who can fill several needs. He does not fit the maverick template, and the affection around him is quieter. Asia complicates the picture. Ravindra Jadeja and Shakib Al Hasan have shown that spin-bowling all-rounders can sit at the centre of a team. Jadeja's left-arm spin, lower-order batting and fielding are not separate skills; they come from the same cricket intelligence. Shakib has carried batting, bowling and leadership together for years. Yet the default image of an all-rounder in much of the cricket world remains a fast bowler who can hit a long ball. That bias has a language. A seaming pitch is often treated as honest; a turning pitch is treated as tricky. Moeen Ali has spoken about feeling undervalued in England. His spin, batting and occasional leadership have served the team's balance, while the heroic narrative has kept him at its edge. The hierarchy of recognition is part of the story. The wicketkeeper question stretches the category further. Adam Gilchrist batted in the top six on 23 occasions in 96 Tests. If an all-rounder is a player who can be selected for two skills, a keeper who bats in the top six changes the team's balance in the same way. Cricket's labels prefer to keep him in a separate box. Chris Harris of New Zealand shows another boundary: a low-key utility player who scored quickly, bowled when needed and fielded with intelligence. Sri Lanka's batter-spinners make the same point in a different register. The all-rounder is not always tall, fast or loud. Jansen arrives as a near-laboratory specimen. Height, left-arm angle, bounce, seam movement, lower-order power and safe hands in the slips. Dale Steyn has called him currently the best cricketer in the world. Faf du Plessis has praised him in similar terms. The admiration is understandable. The caution is necessary. A bowling average of 20.81 after 99 wickets is extraordinary. A batting average of 25.66 is not yet the foundation of a complete all-rounder. The 85 in Gqeberha shows possibility; possibility becomes an institution only through repeated innings. The word unicorn raises Jansen and traps him. Every failure becomes evidence of incompleteness. South Africa's tradition is not a production line. It is a row of exceptions. Procter, Pollock, Klusener and Kallis each appeared at a different cricket moment, under a different selectorial need. Treating the lineage as a factory makes selectors believe the next one will arrive automatically. He does not. An all-rounder is made where talent, workload and team need meet. Rarity has causes beyond talent. When a player has two skills, selectors often treat one as a luxury. A batter averaging 40 is told his bowling is a bonus; a bowler averaging 25 is told his batting is a bonus. The language of bonus makes the all-rounder a second-class citizen. The body adds another limit. A fast bowler who bats carries extra load through shoulders, back and hips. T20 scheduling multiplies the load. A franchise may ask for four overs, middle-order runs and fielding in the same match. Injury follows, and after injury comes the demand to prove yourself on return, a demand that can shorten rehabilitation and raise risk. Jansen should be judged in three separate columns. As a bowler, he is complete now. As a batter, he is potential, not established fact. As a team effect, his value depends on how South Africa uses him: a fast bowler batting at six, or a fourth bowler batting at eight. Those roles look similar on a teamsheet and are different in the balance of power inside the XI. When I watch Jansen bowl, the pause in the stands holds the answer. Silence in the stands is not silence; it is a held breath. Before a bouncer, the crowd knows something may happen. That expectation is the all-rounder's real capital. He creates two possibilities at once: a wicket and runs. That double possibility is the rarest commodity in cricket. Rarity also invites exaggeration. A single 85 can be read as a career proof. The 99th wicket is not a milestone; it is a mirror. It shows what we want the all-rounder to be, and what we are slower to see. With Jansen, we want the future superstar. His batting average says the present is still under construction. My cricket watching has moved from Dhaka to Dubai, from Barcelona to Port Elizabeth, and the same question follows me. Do we judge a player by his work or by his story? Jansen's story is handsome: tall, left-arm, quick, capable with the bat. The story is so handsome that the number steps back. The real test of an all-rounder is not in the story. It is at the selection table. Next season I will watch three things. Whether his batting average moves into the thirties. Whether he can carry both roles across a run of matches without injury. Where South Africa bats him. Those answers will decide whether he is a poem about two players in one, or the rarer institution cricket remembers for a generation. The future of the all-rounder is likely to be more specialised. T20 economics rewards two skills and breaks the body that carries them. The survivor will be world-class in one skill and reliable in the other. Jansen already has the first. If the second becomes a 30-average batting record, the argument will end. If it does not, the argument will continue, and cricket will keep standing before its own mirror.