‘I didn’t know if there was light at the end of the tunnel’ – Lauren Bell on rebuilding her action

The month before a home World Cup – a potentially “once in a career” experience – Lauren Bell is at the peak of her powers. Facing New Zealand playing her first T20I for 10 months, she struck with her first delivery. It was a near-perfect ball, sent down on a fourth stump line, moving a touch away with bounce, and catching the inside of Georgia Plimmer’s bat, ricocheting onto the stumps. Three days later, she struck in her first over again, this time with a ball that held its line and clattered into the middle of the stumps.

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Having played both white-ball series’ against New Zealand, Bell has built out an exceptional body of work over the winter. She won the WPL with RCB – Smriti Mandhana praising her as the match-winner in the final – before taking a five-for in her opening match of the county season for Hampshire. In April, she reached a career-best of third in the ICC’s T20I rankings.

'I didn’t know if there was light at the end of the tunnel'

Bell is now the leader of England’s attack across formats, having solved the worrying proposition of the holes left by the retirements of Anya Shrubsole and Katherine Sciver-Brunt shortly after she made her international debut in 2022. As a tall, snappy quick, she followed the Shrubsole mould of using a powerful in-swinger in her early years, to great effect, rapidly becoming indispensable to England in all three formats. But it was a conversation with then England head coach Jon Lewis, after the 2023 Ashes, which led her to rip up her own rule book and start again.

“We finished the [2023] Ashes, and my head coach and my bowling coach sat me down and said ‘how are we going to get better?’” Bell told The Scoop. “You want to keep improving and you want to be the best seamer in the world, how are you going to do that? We said the three big things about fast bowling are pace, bounce and movement. From the position I was in, I wasn’t as tall as I could be, I only had the option of swinging the ball in and probably lost a bit of pace. So it was, let’s get you more upright, get you in a stronger safer position – I also had back pain – and go from there. That was the initial plan.”

In-swing has long dominated the women’s game, in a large part due to the exaggerated movement when the ball is bowled at slower paces compared to in the men’s game. Out-swing is harder to control, in-swing produces magic banana balls which clatter into the wicket. For Bell, developing an out-swinger at the expense of her deadly in-swingers was a huge risk, and required taking a sledgehammer to her action.

“It was an extremely difficult time of my career,” she says. “As it [the plan] adapted, I was more upright and naturally the ball started swinging away. That’s why it was difficult because I’d bowled this in-swing my whole career, and I had plans and I knew where to start the ball and suddenly I got to a position where I was swinging it the other way, and I didn’t know my plans, and I didn’t know where to start it. I didn’t trust it.

“Also, because my action was new, I wasn’t consistently doing the same thing, so it wasn’t consistently swinging the same way. Honestly, when I changed it and I was playing international cricket, it was probably the hardest time I’ve been through in my career because I didn’t know if there was light at the end of the tunnel. I felt like I was doing really well and I’ve changed my action and now I’m really struggling on the international stage, and it was awful.”

'The Ashes was the best I felt in nine months'

The snags of the changes Bell was trying to make behind the scenes, while also leading England’s attack through the constant schedule of World Cups, started to bleed through onto the field. In an ODI at Durham against New Zealand in 2024, while she was at the thick end of re-learning her action, she took a hammering, bowling three wides down the leg side in quick succession. She was taken off after three overs – the shortest spell of her ODI career.

But, after 18 months of inconsistency, the end of 2024 saw that work start to pay off.

“There wasn’t a moment, but there were definitely balls I bowled in those six months where I thought ‘that’s the ball’ and I can see the light at the end of the tunnel,” says Bell. “It was probably the Test match before the 2025 Ashes in Australia, the Test match was where I finally bowled spells of consistent bowling. Then I went to the Ashes, and I know it was not a successful Ashes for us as a team, but personally it was probably the best I’d felt in about nine months. Those were two series where I came off and felt like I could really see it and was starting to prove to everyone why I did what I did.”

For Bell, it wasn’t just about the proof on the pitch. In-swing continues to be an effective weapon in the women’s game, and for someone who achieved huge success with it, starting over was a huge risk.

“I felt like I had a lot to prove and I felt like a lot of people wondered why I did what I did,” she says. “Nothing had gone wrong in my international career, and I really hope that what I went through inspires girls or boys to not be scared to make changes to get better, because right now I’m in a better place as a bowler than I was at the end of the Ashes in 2023 and I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t go through all of that.

“Matt Mason was my bowling coach and he was incredible, there were a lot of tears and he was there for me. Jon Lewis was my head coach and he had full faith in me and full backing and said, ‘Lauren you’re going to play and you are going to come out the end of this’. Without both of their constant support and reassurance and talking about why we’re doing it, and where we want to get to, I just think it would have been horrible.”

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Now, almost three years after going back to the drawing board, Bell has her eyes set on a home T20 World Cup to unleash her new action on the global stage in front of home fans. Nevertheless, there’s always work going on in the background to get even better.

“I’ve obviously got the away swinger and wobbling it back in, but I would love to get to a place where I’m fully confident in swinging it back in like I used to. It’s there, I did it for years. I love training, I want to get better all the time so I don’t think it’s a million miles away from being able to bring that back into my game.”

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