Jenny Gunn: "I would have wanted to stop bowling - I didn’t really enjoy it"

NICK FRIEND: It would be enough to break lesser souls. Cricket is a palpably unusual sport; the stigma surrounding the bending of an arm is as central to the game’s laws as it is utterly nonsensical

“My teammates call me Chucky,” Jenny Gunn laughs.

She hasn’t always found it funny. As a 17-year-old, Gunn was called into the umpire’s room on the day of her international debut to be told by one of the officials that her action was illegal. Let that sink in; a teenager on her England bow essentially informed that all she had learnt and all she had achieved had been, to one pair of eyes, tainted.

It would be enough to break lesser souls. Cricket is a palpably unusual sport; the stigma surrounding the bending of an arm is as central to the game’s laws as it is utterly nonsensical.

It is considered a form of cheating, but a very specific degree of deceit – there is a bizarre construct around its severity. Those whose arms bend beyond the mystery fifteen degrees are looked upon with a shamed scorn.

The most feted of all those tested, Muttiah Muralitharan, spent spells of his career practically vilified because of a rare hyperextension that had everything to do with biology and nothing to do with any modicum of choice.

Yet, Gunn – now in her fifteenth year as an England international – can look back on her own battle with both elbow and critics with the philosophy of an athlete who has more than overcome her detractors.

She was once banned from bowling in domestic cricket after being no-balled when playing in Perth, while she has twice passed ICC tests on her action.

“It probably helped me to work on my batting more because you never know what is going to happen,” she reflects, looking back on the feeling of carpet swept from feet.

It doesn’t require much time in Gunn's presence to understand why the seamer is so highly thought of by those to have shared in her international career. Witty, self-deprecating, full of beans, painfully modest, she is all that a coach could want from a senior player in a side that spends the majority of its year together.

“It was an eye-opener,” she admits of the public scrutiny she faced; Gunn was a cricketer being stripped of her primary breadwinning skill. Imagine being a mathematician, but being told you were counting wrong; imagine being a chef, but being told you couldn’t cook. Just imagine being cursed as a cheat.

^{Gunn was the first cricketer - male or female - to play 100 T20Is for England}

And now venture back into Gunn’s world, one where deliveries are still greeted with shouts of ‘no ball’ from the boundary’s edge – all this, seven years after her last ICC clearance. Her stock ball was clocked at seven degrees, nowhere near the game’s limit.

It is grating. It is psychologically straining. It is testament to Gunn that her action remains as it always has done: awkward, unorthodox, unfailingly effective.

The first English cricketer – male or female – to reach a century of international T20 caps; that is some justification. It is quite the certificate to have sat on the mantelpiece – a utopian riposte to any doubter.

“It really looks weird,” Gunn jokes of her gangly coil at the crease. “It is disgusting. I hate it. I don’t have to watch myself, so it’s fine. I see where people are coming from – if you are at a certain part of the ground, it does look a bit dodgy. But if you put it in slow-motion, you will see it straight away.

“Before, I had to take a disc to umpires before games and tell them to watch it. Some didn’t want to watch it and I’d just say: ‘Well, don’t call me for a no-ball if you’re not prepared to watch it.’

“When they tested me, they told me I had a subcontinent elbow. Basically, I could probably bowl a doosra – not that I’m going to go and do it. I’ve learnt all about my action. I didn’t know any of this at the time.

“Now, I’m not bothered if someone calls me a chucker in the crowd. I just have fun with it. I know I don’t. I’m nowhere near it. People have their own opinions and they are allowed that. Happy days.”

Happy days, indeed. She has a World Cup medal to show for it all.

As if to highlight the curious quirks of this sport so entrenched in tradition, those who analysed Gunn at Loughborough wrote a journal specifically on the oddities of her action. “Full of figures and angles – I don’t really understand it,” she jokes again.

Then, albeit briefly, Gunn switches into a more serious mode of reflective introspection.

“I would have wanted to stop bowling. I didn’t really enjoy it. It was actually my teammates who got me through,” she remembers.

“It was weird. I was pooing myself anyway in that first game as a 17-year-old. I got called into the umpire’s room after the game with Clare Connor, who was our captain at the time.

“I was just thinking: ‘Oh my god, what have I done?’

"I bowl slow. I don’t get loads of wickets. If I bowled 90 miles per hour, you could understand.

“Everyone has got a different action – look at Bumrah. In England, he would probably have had to change his action, but look at how brilliant he is.”

^{Gunn was a member of the World Cup-winning squad of 2017}

This is all in the past, of course. Nowadays, she lives very much in the comfort of her own skin. An absolute veteran of English women’s cricket, she has grown up with her sport like few others. She opened the bowling during the 2005 Ashes – a series that flew under the radar of the men’s equivalent, but one – in any case – that she pinpoints as a moment that changed attitudes towards the women’s game.

That Gunn is still going strong speaks volumes for the enduring qualities of a natural sportswoman. One of few disappointments of the 2017 World Cup was her spilled catch in the final. It was, by any standards, a sitter. Of course, it mattered not in the game's context - perhaps even stretching its drama, though it tied Gunn’s name to a moment that could not be further from the reality.

A fine three-dimensional cricketer, it was no reflection on her fielding ability, but rather a split-second of madness in a cauldron of unprecedented pressure.

After all, Gunn made her England Test debut in 2004 in the same match as Katherine Brunt. They are the only two still playing; they weren’t professionals then, but they are now. Much has changed. Back then, even the thought of a match-winning catch at a packed house at Lord's would have felt like an absurdity, a handful of light-years beyond.

It all means that for Gunn, by her own admission, her current situation is nothing if not a wonderful surprise – a life she never believed she would live. “I never thought I’d get to play in the professional era,” she admits. “For me, everything is just a bonus.”

“It has been great to see the progress and how it is filtering down. You can see a massive pool of players now, whereas before you could almost pick the eleven.

“The next thing for us is to get more people getting paid so they have the same training and facilities that we have. Then, we can kick on once again.

“The talent pool is huge, but we have to prevent that risk of seeing people fade away because they have to choose between cricket and a career.”

That, in itself, represents a giant step; in her youth, this was a pathway that seemed little more than a distant pipedream.

But nonetheless, Gunn credits the aspirations of her childhood with where she is now, fifteen years down the line from her first cap.

Curiously, her story begins – indirectly, at least – with Brian Clough. There can be few who can make such a claim. Even fewer, one assumes, in women's cricket.

^{Gunn, pictured fourth from the left on the top row, with her England Women's squad before the 2005 Ashes series}

Alongside Peter Shilton, Stan Bowles, Martin O’Neill and Trevor Francis, her father was part of Nottingham Forest’s 1980 European Cup-winning side - a machine built by Clough in his image.

Bryn Gunn, much like his daughter in a sense, was a dependable, no-frills full-back. He only ever scored once in 131 games for Forest. But it was what he taught his daughter about his own time in professional sport that has so heavily impacted on her own longevity. It was a lesson from one of sport's great managers passed down to Bryn and then to Jenny.

“Dad has always said to me that he would never change the era he played in for the world,” Gunn says.

“He still speaks to all his Forest lot, which is lovely. They are so down-to-earth, with some amazing players. It was a professional era that he played in, but for very little money.

“Now, they win the Champions League and get millions, whereas I think they got £1,000. It is completely different – even though it was a lot of money back then.

WOMEN'S CRICKET HUB

“He just used to say: ‘Always have fun.’ But I think having fun made me push myself even harder because I was enjoying myself, I was enjoying winning, I was trying to beat him in races, which I will never do.

“And then, I have brothers and sisters as well, so we were always competitive with one another. It was just such a nice household to grow up in. We still have that now because I have a nephew and he’s getting into cricket and football. It’s always fun and it’s always with a smile on our faces. It has helped me to play for as long as possible.”

And it is that essence of fun that she hopes will never desert a close-knit unit that has accomplished so much together, even when this stalwart ultimately calls it a day. She recalls a photo taken after the World Cup final in the Lord's dressing room; it includes Heather Knight’s playing eleven with support staff and other players from the four-year cycle. One big team with one enormous common goal.

“They are like a second family,” she says of the team developed by Mark Robinson. “They are friends for life, which is really nice.

“It is a picture I have got forever and a memory that will last a lifetime.”

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