Jenny Gunn has been there, done it and bought the t-shirt. She’s also shut the wardrobe and re-opened it and is eyeing up a brand new summer range!
Gunn, the self-confessed, ‘Worst retiree’ is going around again having, in her own mind at least, called time on her playing career 12 months ago before being coaxed back onto the field pretty quickly afterwards.
The Nottingham-born all-rounder, 34, signed a short-term deal with the Northern Diamonds for this summer’s Rachael Heyhoe Flint Trophy, impressing with bat and ball on the run to the Edgbaston final.
Now she has been handed one of five full-time contracts with the Diamonds ahead of 2021, when her experience will be vital both on the field as a wily seamer and a lower middle order bat and off it too.
A 15-year England career between 2004 and 2019 brought three World Cup titles and five Ashes triumphs, the icing on the cake coming in 2017 when she hit 25 not out and bowled seven overs for only 17 runs as England beat India in front of a full house at Lord’s to win the 50-over World Cup.
Ahead of 2021, she sits in the top five of all-time one-day international appearances by any woman in world cricket with 144. India’s Mithali Raj leads the way with 209 appearances and England’s retired former captain Charlotte Edwards holds the national record with 191.
Her haul of 136 ODI wickets also puts her in England’s top five all-time wicket-takers, a list led by Yorkshire’s Katherine Brunt with 150.
Only Gunn (104) and Danni Wyatt (113) have made more than 100 international T20 appearances for England.
The stats keep coming. She is one of only a select few (Cricinfo list only nine) players who have taken 100 ODI wickets and scored 1,000 runs, with Gunn the only Englishwoman to have achieved that feat.
2021 will be Gunn’s 21st in senior cricket having debuted for Nottinghamshire in one-day (List A cricket) in 2001, at the age of 15.
She has played domestic cricket both in England and Australia, playing for Notts, Yorkshire (2011), Warwickshire, Northern Diamonds (2020), Yorkshire Diamonds (2016 and 2017) and Loughborough Lightning.
Down Under, she has represented South Australia and Western Australia.
In 2014, she was amongst the first 18 women to be offered central contracts by the England and Wales Cricket Board, alongside Yorkshire’s Brunt, Lauren Winfield-Hill and current Northern Diamonds coach Dani Hazell.