Marco Jansen, the Definition of an All-Rounder, and the Gap Between 20.81 and 25.66

At St George's Park that afternoon, South Africa were 110 for six. The wind was sharp, the seam was moving, and a 6ft 8in left-arm seamer walked out to bat and made 85. That innings sent me back to an old spreadsheet. One number kept pulling my eye to the same place: Marco Jansen's Test bowling average of 20.81 against a batting average of 25.66.

The gap between those two figures is the real subject here. Writing admiring prose about a player with two skills is easy; the hard work is deciding what standard earns the word all-rounder. When I hand-coded all 132 matches of the 2026 Bangladesh Premier League season into a single spreadsheet, I learned something that has held up since: cricket's most romantic words are its least audited ones. All-rounder sits near the top of that list.

South Africa's all-rounder lineage is not new. Mike Procter, Shaun Pollock, Lance Klusener, Jacques Kallis — the list has been handed down generation to generation. Kallis's 13,289 Test runs, 45 centuries and 292 wickets are its boldest line: a man who could be picked for his batting or for his bowling. The Guardian's The Spin newsletter recently mapped that inheritance and added two new names — Wiaan Mulder, and after him, Marco Jansen.

That analysis called Jansen a bioengineered cricketer, and the reasons are obvious: the frame, the left-arm angle, the seam movement, the bounce, the lower-order power. Faf du Plessis and Dale Steyn have both described a kind of doubleness in him — a player who does not force a selector to find an extra slot.

Stop at the skill set and you lose half the story. The interesting question is the language around him. Say all-rounder and a specific image surfaces: a fast bowler who hits long balls, a heroic silhouette with the run-up of a patriot. Years of watching matches in grounds and on screens tell me that image is the biggest filter in the sport. It is the filter that has consistently priced real all-rounders at a discount.

Start with the arithmetic. The most popular shortcut is that anyone whose batting average exceeds his bowling average is an all-rounder. That test is broken, because it turns specialist batters into all-rounders. By that rule Joe Root qualifies. So does Don Bradman, whose Test batting average of 99.94 dwarfs his bowling average of 36.00. Nobody calls Bradman an all-rounder.

The workable test is functional. It asks whether a player could be selected for either skill alone, and whether his presence lets a captain add a bowler without losing batting depth. Jarrod Kimber put the effect in one line: an all-rounder changes the whole team, not merely the scorecard.

The definition works, but it is uncomfortably subjective. Selectable on either skill depends on team strength, era, pitch and selectorial philosophy. A player can be a genuine all-rounder for a weak side and a useful one for a strong side. That is why the count of true all-rounders cannot be captured in a single statistic; it shows up in the balance sheet of a team.

Look at the rarity in numbers. A century and a five-wicket haul in the same Test has happened 41 times in Test history, produced by 29 players. Ian Botham did it five times. Botham, Richard Hadlee, Imran Khan and Kapil Dev are remembered as the last golden generation of all-rounders.

Why that era produced them matters. County workloads, gaps in the Test calendar and the absence of T20 created an environment where one body could carry two skills. Today's schedule does not. Read the all-rounder shortage purely as a talent shortage and you hide the structural cause.

Earlier generations were just as strange. 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, and became the first player to score 100 runs and take ten wickets in the same match in the tied Test of 2026. These are not romantic fictions; they are accounting.

Then comes the most original thread: the template bias. In non-Asian cricket imagination, the default all-rounder is a fast bowler who can bat. Ravindra Jadeja and Shakib Al Hasan are both all-time greats, yet the language of all-round greatness often places them in a separate room — respected, but in a different frame. Moeen Ali's case is sharper: the discussion of his value in England carried a quiet undervaluation of a spinner who did not fit the Botham mould.

Writing this from Khulna, one name is impossible to skip. Shakib Al Hasan has spent a decade and a half as simultaneously one of Bangladesh's best batters and best bowlers, yet he sits at the edge of the global all-rounder conversation. That is not his shortfall; it is the conversation's. The language that granted Botham greatness granted Shakib respect — two different currencies.

England's case is worth reading closely. Botham, Andrew Flintoff and Ben Stokes share a character: the maverick who arrives with a cigarette dangling and the smell of beer and wins a match. Sam Curran is a useful left-arm bowler and an inventive batter, but he does not fit that heroic silhouette — and his praise accumulates more slowly for it. Australia's pattern differs in style, not in gap. Andrew Symonds, Shane Watson, Mitchell Marsh, Cameron Green and Beau Webster are good names, but the sustained, decade-long all-rounder is rare there.

The boundary cases are no tidier. Adam Gilchrist batted in the top six in 23 of his 96 Tests, yet nobody calls him an all-rounder — wicketkeeping is a different room. Quiet utility players like Chris Harris barely reach the star conversation, though they are invaluable to team balance. Sri Lanka's batter-spinners sit at another edge of the same line. Labels are less tidy than scorecards, and admitting that is the honest move.

A methodology note, because without it the claim is incomplete. Sample: Jansen's Test career is still short, so no verdict here should be read as a long-run trend. Sources: The Guardian and The Spin analysis, my own scorecard notes, and the method lessons of the 2026 league spreadsheet. Error margin: the definition itself is normative, so the numbers point a direction rather than deliver a final ruling.

Here I want to bring in the spreadsheet argument. I treat statistics as assets: they have value, they depreciate, and they carry an expiry date. On that ledger, Jansen's bowling average of 20.81 is a mature asset. His batting average of 25.66 is an immature one whose future value is still an estimate. The difference is simple: his bowling gets him into the XI today; his batting does not.

My working rule sets a threshold. For an all-rounder batting below No 6, a batting average of 30 is a usable pass mark, and a bowling average under 24 means he is selectable as a bowler. Only when both conditions hold does the all-rounder label leave the scorecard and match the team's balance.

There is an uncomfortable side to this. Unicorn, bioengineered, two players in one — these words create a promise, and promises are hard to reconcile with accounts. On Jansen, the batting evidence is still thin. The analysis concedes as much by calling it potential, but at headline level potential becomes fact. That is ordinary model overfitting: six or seven visible traits fit together and the story feels complete, even though any small sample fits hard when you add variables.

The second problem is method. Australia, England and Asia are useful categories in an essay and weak categories as evidence. There is no systematic count of which broadcaster uses which word in which country; the examples are selected. Eighty-three closed-door matches taught me that environmental claims need to be tested separately. Cultural claims without a count can be accurate description; they are not proof.

The third question nobody asked: why are all-rounders rare in the first place? Workload, injury risk, the T20 calendar and selectorial incentives — none of them are opened up. Yet the causes are there. A specialist batter or a specialist bowler is a safe investment for a captain; asking one body to carry two assets wears both down. Jansen's 6ft 8in frame produces excellent bounce and adds spinal load.

Where does the cultural bias meet the statistics? That is my core objection. The premium placed on the pace-bowling all-rounder echoes into how numbers are read. Twenty wickets at 20 makes a board sit up; 200 wickets at 25 for a spinner attracts the word condition-dependent. Same achievement, two different readings.

In the transfer market I learned to wait for the third source, because the all-rounder premium in franchise auctions is routinely mispriced. A team that pays heavily on one season of dual returns is buying probability, not proven output. In Jansen's case the market is paying for the bowling and treating the batting as a bonus. Reverse the two and the sum becomes much harder.

So what should you watch? The next ten Tests are a defined examination. If his batting average clears 30 while the bowling average stays under 24, the two-players-in-one claim moves toward proof. If the batting average stalls around 25, he remains an excellent bowler who can bat — two separate jobs, not one. My ISTJ habit is simple: audit the row, then trust the trend. The question left is whether cricket is learning to recognise all-rounders, or still measuring players against a mould.