I have compared Marco Jansen to a giant praying mantis. He is all limbs; it feels as if every part of him is too long. A woollen jumper that sags when wet. His wingspan is so enormous that he could itch his ankle without bending over. He doesn’t look like a fast bowler. If anything, he’s more of a skinny small forward in basketball, or - you know - a praying mantis.
But that is not his animal; I got it wrong.
Recently, I casually threw into a talkSPORT chat that this man could be the best Test bowler ever. People did not like that.
There is some format bleed on this; Jansen has not been a great white-ball seamer. But in Tests, he averages 20.8 and he’s 26-years-old. Of all the fast bowlers with 95 wickets before turning 27, he has the second-best mark.
The bowler ahead of him is Shaun Pollock.
Some bowlers are almost done athletically by 27; Pollock’s back and hamstrings were held together with staples by this point. The great young quick who could seam and swing the ball was replaced by a stiff English county bowler.
Pollock was a bowler with a lot of skills and natural advantages, but no bowlers in history have more tools than Jansen.
Pollock is better than the lanky left-armer at swing and seam, and was a lot more accurate. But what he doesn’t have is the full range of weapons of the young bowler.
That is because there are very few bowlers in the history of cricket who have the array of methods to get someone out that Jansen has. He has seven, and he’s not far from having all eight.
A praying mantis has one way to kill its victim; an octopus is almost limitless in comparison thanks to its eight arms. Jansen could be a magic octopus destroying everything in front of him.
