Marco Jansen Steps Up as Leader in ODI Series Against Australia
Marco Jansen has spent most of his international life running in with a new ball that technically belonged to someone else.
Kagiso Rabada’s name on the teamsheet. Lungi Ngidi’s hand on the lacquer. Jansen, tall and raw at first, learning on the job with two of South Africa’s modern masters at his shoulder.
This week in Durban, that changes.
Rabada is out. Ngidi is out. Against Australia in a three-match ODI series starting at Kingsmead on Thursday, the new ball — and the attack — belongs to Jansen.
He knows exactly what that means.
“They’re world-class bowlers, especially in South Africa,” he said of Rabada and Ngidi on Monday. “They know how to bowl in these conditions, and they know how to get the most out of the ball on a particular day. It feels like I’m going to have to take that leadership role and lead from the front for the first time.”
He’s being modest. The numbers say he’s been edging towards this for a while.
A career tied to KG and Lungi
Strip away the hypotheticals about future seasons and left-arm dream attacks and you land on a simple truth: Jansen’s new-ball story has almost always been written alongside Rabada or Ngidi.
In Test cricket he has opened the bowling in only four innings, all of them in India last November when Rabada was sidelined with a rib injury. Those are the only times he has actually bowled the first over of a Test innings, but he has shared the new ball 16 times — every single time with Rabada.
The white-ball pattern is even more revealing.
In ODIs, Jansen has taken the new ball 14 times. Eight of those with Ngidi sharing it, three with Rabada. Across 12 ODIs where he and one of them split the first two overs, Ngidi has gone first seven times, Rabada three.
T20I cricket tells the same story in bolder ink. Jansen has been trusted with the new ball in 18 games. Rabada has followed him with the second over in seven of those, Ngidi in two, Gerald Coetzee and Aiden Markram in three each. When Jansen has been the one to bowl the second over — in 10 matches — Ngidi has taken the very first ball six times, Rabada twice.
Add it all up and the picture is stark. Across formats, Jansen has bowled the first or second over of an innings 74 times. On 54 of those occasions — 72.97% — his partner has been Rabada or Ngidi.
Now, for once, neither of them is there. But their fingerprints are all over the bowler, and the leader, he is becoming.
“I base what I think leadership looks like on playing with KG and Lungi,” Jansen said. “When things go sideways or it’s tough, especially when we’re in the field, they have a way of calming and slowing things down. That’s what I’ll be trying to do.”
The lesson isn’t about barking orders. It’s about reading the room.
“Because the last thing you want when you’re struggling in an over or at the death when the ball is flying around is someone just giving solutions and saying do this or do that. It’s important to pick up on the moments when a bowler needs time to slow things down and ask simple questions; things like what’s the plan here or how are we going to get this guy off strike.
“We do all the work before the game. We know what plans we want to put into action, what balls we want to bowl, and which fields we want to set. On game day it’s all about how to get the guys in a mental space where they can execute their gameplans. It’s about getting the best out of them.”
That is a senior bowler talking, even if the birth certificate insists he is still only in the early years of his career.
A left-arm wave building
South Africa’s fast-bowling cupboard has taken some brutal hits lately. Injuries, workloads, the grind of modern schedules. Yet the country keeps producing tall, hostile left-armers as if they’re rolling off a coastal production line.
Right now, Marco Jansen, Corbin Bosch, Gerald Coetzee and Kwena Maphaka are the frontline quicks standing. All four, along with Duan Jansen — who launched his international white-ball career in Namibia last month — have been picked for the ODI series against Australia.
Project that forward and the imagination starts to race. Keshav Maharaj, the left-arm spinner and captain, operating with a battery of left-arm quicks: the Jansens, Maphaka, perhaps even Raynard van Tonder Basson in the mix for the three-Test series against Australia starting in Durban on October 9.
Or in the two Tests against Bangladesh at the Wanderers and Centurion from November 15 to 27. Or the three-Test showdown with England in Johannesburg, Centurion and Cape Town from December 26 to January 7.
If, in a year or two, someone answers “2026/27” to the question of when South Africa fielded an attack stacked with left-arm pace, they might not be far off. The trend is pointing that way.
Jansen, though, has little time for what-ifs. His job is immediate: lead an attack missing its two most experienced quicks against one of the most ruthless batting units in world cricket.
Running in underdone, delivering over par
For all the talk of him being “still standing”, Jansen isn’t exactly bulletproof either. He arrived at this point via a stuttering build-up that underlines how fine the margins are for fast bowlers.
“My build-up to that game didn’t go as planned,” he said of his first-class outing for the Titans against the Dolphins in Centurion from September 10 to 12. “I planned to bowl two or three weeks before but then I got sick. I was on antibiotics for a week-and-a-half, two weeks. That cut my preparation short, so I only had three days of prep and felt heavily undercooked going into the match. I also saw two physios as well for small stuff. Coming back from after The Hundred I had to sort out stiffness in the body.”
On the field, none of that showed.
He bowled nine overs in the Dolphins’ first innings, taking 3 for 39. With the bat, he cracked seven fours in a 45-ball 37, the kind of counterpunch that shifts a game’s mood. Then he really found his rhythm in the second innings: 17 overs, 4 for 61, and a Titans win by an innings and 60 runs.
Those are the spells that harden a bowler, especially one asked to jump between formats, roles and responsibilities.
Now comes Australia, Kingsmead, and the weight of a new-ball legacy that no longer has Rabada or Ngidi to share the load.
The left-armer who once lived in their shadow walks out first. The question, for South Africa’s season and perhaps their next era of fast bowling, is whether Marco Jansen is about to step into his own.
