Jansen ready to step up as South Africa's seam attack loses its senior pair

South Africa begin their home summer without their two most experienced seam bowlers, as Kagiso Rabada and Lungi Ngidi recover from separate hamstring injuries – but Marco Jansen is ready to fill the gap.

Jansen does not carry Rabada's 258 international caps or Ngidi's 159, but with 83 appearances across formats he is now the most capped seamer in the squad, and knows the responsibility will fall to him, Firdose Moonda reports for Cricinfo.

“It feels like I'm going to have to take that leadership role,” Jansen said from Durban, where South Africa have gathered ahead of their first one-day international on Thursday. He described it as likely his first time taking on such a role, and said he was looking forward to finding out what he could do in the position.

Jansen will start the task in the format he has played most – he has featured in 32 ODIs, against 30 T20 internationals and 21 Tests – but said he would draw heavily on lessons learnt from Rabada and Ngidi.

He explained that leadership, in his experience of playing alongside the pair, meant finding ways to calm and slow the game down when things went wrong in the field, rather than dictating solutions – instead helping bowlers work through simple questions about the plan in a difficult moment.

It has been a heavy year for Jansen, who has already played 44 matches in 2026 across the IPL, MLC, the Hundred and international cricket – four fewer than his career-high seasons of 2023 to 2025 – with three months still to go. All but one of those appearances, a first-class match for the Titans against the Dolphins in Centurion last weekend, came in the shortest format.

That four-day game marked the start of his home season, and Jansen took seven wickets while also bowling the most overs in the match – 26 – a workload he said was by design, to find his rhythm after a pre-season disrupted by illness.

He said a bout requiring a week and a half to two weeks of antibiotics had cut his preparation to just three days before the match, leaving him feeling underdone, but that his timing and body felt good as the game progressed, and that he had bowled close to a full-strength spell by the third day.

South Africa are also without seamer Ottneil Baartman, sidelined by a third hamstring injury, though his absence has opened the door for Jansen's twin brother Duan, added to the ODI squad and the leading wicket-taker in South Africa's recent series in Namibia.

The presence of left-armer Kwena Maphaka may make it difficult to field both Jansens in the same XI, but Marco said it would be special if the brothers played together – ideally at the third ODI in Potchefstroom, close to where they grew up and went to school.

The pair have played together only once before at senior level, for North West in the 2014 CSA T20 Challenge, in matches that were also in Potchefstroom and which the side won.