Getting stick for Doris Day - and the Ashes

28 November 2006

England's Jenny Gunn is writing a diary for ecb.co.uk during her stint playing cricket Down Under this winter. Follow her exclusively here on ecb.co.uk

Our week started as a normal Monday morning in the gym doing our weights. I had quite a chilled-out start as I had two state games at the weekend.

On Tuesday we went to Clovely Beach, which was quite hard work as it was around 36 C. Charlotte Anneveld took Cheesy and Beth snorkelling in the reef and she actually managed to get me in the water knee deep and I saw a few fish swimming around my feet.

On Friday I flew over to Melbourne to play Victoria with South Australia. Victoria has a couple of Australian internationals (Sarah Edwards, Clea Smith and Cathryn Fitzpatrick) but we were ready for them.

The first day it was like playing in England again. I wore a long sleeve T-shirt and a jumper as it was cold and there was a little bit of drizzle. We batted first and didn’t get off to the best of starts as we lost both openers early.

Scoring was quite difficult and we managed to reach a total of 149 thanks to the middle order scoring some quick runs towards the end of the innings. We have two bowlers who have just been clocked quicker then Fitzpatrick, which is not bad to have two quickies in your team. We managed to take them to the 46th over for five wickets down but we still lost.

In the evening a few of the girls wanted to hear what my taste of music was, so I played one of my mix CDs for them. There was a bit of Kanye West, Lionel Richie, and then Doris Day came on. So now Alicia Dean, Naomia Maidment, and Emma Simpson rip me all the time and just sing ‘whip crack away’ to me now.

Feeling a bit down about my performances I thought I would ring my Nottinghamshire and England team-mate, and my best mate, Jane Smit to catch up with everything that was going on back home. It was good to catch up and she gave me a bit of advice and made me relax a bit more towards my cricket.

The second day we chose to bowl first. Our two openers bowled really well and we got an early breakthrough. We were doing really well but some good hitting and running towards the end of the innings by Victoria got them to 220.

We weren’t worried about the total as the outfield was like lightning and we were confident we could chase there total down.

Again we lost both openers early and Kris Britt and I found batting a little difficult as they were bowling tight lines and when we did hit the ball we couldn’t find the gaps. We both made fifties but we fell 40 short even with a very good run-a-ball 30 from Naomi Maidment.

We are all disappointed but there are still four games left and travel to Queensland for our next games.

Like our England have fart of the day, SA have muff of the day. Muff of the day went to our keeper Deano on Saturday who pulled a spectacular full-length dive down leg side. It was a bit of a shame as the ball had hit the batter and went off to the fielder at square leg.

I got fined for liking a Doris Day song and for being a Pom. Fuming.

It’s not great at the minute being the only English person on a bus listening to the Ashes. As you can manage I’m getting a little bit of stick!