It helps being more than two metres tall and left-arm in a world built to a shorter, right-handed scale.
Telford Vice / Cape Town
SOME fast bowlers appear to have arrived in the world complete and ready to make one of the most complex and strenuous disciplines in sport look easy. Marco Jansen is not that kind of fast bowler.
He’s a gnu blessed with the beanpole body of a basketballer, the face of a World War I poet and the disposition, from a distance at least, of an air traffic controller. It helps being more than two metres tall and left-arm in a world built to a shorter, right-handed scale. But to arrange those disparate attributes well and consistently enough to play at the highest level is no mean feat. It’s one thing to have them, quite another to use them effectively to extract the level of pace and bounce that challenges the game’s best batters.
Having snuck onto the international scene at 21 because Duanne Olivier didn’t recover full fitness from Covid-19 in time to play in the first Test against India in Centurion in December 2021, Jansen was retained for all three matches and finished with 19 wickets — one behind Kagiso Rabada — at 16.47, second only to Lungi Ngidi.
Jansen’s weren’t any old wickets. He dismissed KL Rahul three times, and Mayank Agarwal, Cheteshwar Pujara and Rishabh Pant twice each. Pujara’s average against him, 26.00, was the highest.
We gleaned something of Jansen’s character in the second Test at the Wanderers. He was bounced by India’s pace bowlers and, as is the way of these things, returned the favour. Having hit Jasprit Bumrah on the shoulder with two consecutive deliveries, he aimed his pale poet’s face at the batter, fixed him a cold stare and rattled through a stream of words that didn’t seem at all friendly. Bumrah exploded with anger, lurching towards the still sniping, advancing Jansen. The two met in the middle of the pitch, where Marius Erasmus leapt into Stan Christodolou mode to keep the peace.
MARCO JANSEN was born in Klerksdorp on May 1, 2000. So was his identical twin brother, Duan. Their father, Koos, played rugby for Free State B, North West and the Griffons. Their mother, Erna, was a netball star. Koos set his sons on their journey in sport when they were toddlers by buying them a set of plastic golf clubs. He found they were, even at that age, rather good at smacking a ball around the garden. Before they had started school, they were swinging cricket bats in the back yard.
Koos and Erna knew they had passed on their genes successfully, when, batting for Laërskool Goudkop against Laërskool Saamtrek in an under-nine 20-over match, Marco opened and scored an unbeaten 164. Duan, Koos would say years later, “came in at four and made 80-odd”.
Nine years after that, a pair of tall and toothy 17-year-olds, then at Potchefstroom Gimnasium, were assigned to bowl to the Indians at the Wanderers as they prepared for the third Test of the 2017/18 series. The taller but not the toothier of them, Marco, beat Virat Kohli outside his off stump three times. The Jansens’ reward was a photograph, taken by Koos, with the then India captain that was displayed proudly on the wall of the flat they would share.
The expressions on the three faces tell the story better than any words could. The world’s most prominent cricketer wears the same fake half-smile he would have flashed in a myriad similar moments before and since. The teenagers flanking him are duly and utterly dazzled. If only they had known the near future. Then again, maybe not.
South African Cricket Annual
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