Quiet week ends with a storm

17 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

The start of the week was a quiet one until Tuesday when Cheesy (Rosalie Birch) had a crazy idea to combine our training sessions.

We decided to go down to our local cricket club nets for throw downs, whilst one was batting and one throwing, the spare person would perform 8 x 100 metre sprints on the track.

After 400m my legs were starting to feel like jelly. This was followed by our weekly weights session.

At my club training I am starting to get quite a lot of stick for South Australia from the NSW girls. It wouldn’t be so bad but the fact that we have six players in that squad means there’s a lot of banter going on at the minute.

On Thursday I flew over to Adelaide to meet up with the South Australian Scorpions. I was a little nervous as I didn’t know if they would accept someone into their team who hasn’t trained with them and is coming straight into the team to play games - but I was totally wrong.

Everyone was so helpful and welcoming but I was quite happy to see two familiar faces there; Shelly Nitschke and Karen Rolton, two international Australians, both play there and helped me to get around and meet everyone.

Adelaide is so different to Sydney. It’s so quiet and rural and everything is within a 20-30 minute drive. On Thursday evening our team had to attend a girls’ cricket academy for around 400 girls at the Adelaide Oval, which was cool because I got to stand right in the middle next to the Ashes Test wicket.

My first game was against Western Australia who Laura Joyce, a fellow England player, was playing for. We won the toss and chose to bat scoring 190.

Shelly scored a very good 93 but I only managed to score seven and so was much happier at getting two wickets for 33 off 10 overs. We ended up winning by 12 runs, which was a good start to our state season.

On Saturday night it started to rain, which was really surprising as they are in an eight-month drought and it didn’t stop for 12 hours. Plus a thunder storm which meant I didn’t get to sleep till around 4am.

Our pitch on Sunday was in a bit of a mess and after waiting three hours learning how to play Aussie rules football the umpires decided to call it off. Basically Sunday was quite a dull day of hanging around before returning to Shelly’s house where I was staying until my flight on Monday morning back home.