George Pinner and Jo Hunter would laugh a little self-consciously at being dubbed the golden couple of British hockey. But, sitting in their neat house just off the M40, an easy drive away from GB hockey training base in Bisham, they exude the glow of newlyweds. Strangely, the hallway is completely clear of hockey gear. Pinner’s goalkeeping kit is drying in the garden and Hunter, probably the neater and more organised of the two, has a kitbag already packed for a trip to Holland with her club this weekend. Quite when the couple ever get to spend time together is something of a mystery and the next two weeks could be particularly fraught.
Pinner, still raw from the failure of the men’s team in Rio, has kept his place in the England squad for the World League tournament in London, which acts as a qualifier for next year’s World Cup. Hunter, who has just turned 26, is four years younger, and has just been recalled to the women’s squad for the first time in four years for tours to South Africa and, more recently, to Spain. The final group of 18 will be selected this week before playing Investec Tests against Argentina and Holland in the Olympic Park and Hunter, an attacking midfielder, is hoping she has done enough to figure in the selectors’ plans not just for the next two weeks but for the next three years, with England and Great Britain, through to the Tokyo Olympic Games.
The couple first met through hockey at the Beeston Club in Nottingham seven years ago so it has not been a whirlwind romance. Pinner was the reserve goalkeeper for the Great Britain team in London, claiming greater fame for posing naked with six of his teammates for the Everyman cancer charity, and then graduated to the first team in the lead-up to Rio. The Olympics ended in tears for both parties, Pinner because genuine hopes of a medal were extinguished before the tournament had really begun, and Hunter, who missed out on the GB team, because she shared her future husband’s despair from the sidelines. “You played really well in Rio,” she says, probably for the thousandth time. “There’s nothing much you can do to help other than just give a kiss and a hug. But I just cried.”
The best and the worst moment came when the pair went to watch the women’s final, where the gold medal was won by the shootout heroics of Maddie Hinch, Pinner’s opposite number. “I know Maddie well and she was brilliant, but that night was the scariest and lowest moment of my life,” says Pinner with a disarming honesty. “I cried all night. It was nothing against the girls being the champions, but there is a jealousy there. I wanted to do what Maddie had done. I talked to the psychologist for four hours about it.” The winning penalty was converted by Holly Webb, who, just three weeks ago, was one of Hunter’s bridesmaids.
Once they had returned home, there was no question of quitting. Pinner had unfinished business with the Great Britain men’s team and Hunter, who won her first cap in 2013, was pushing to return to the international squad for the next Olympic cycle. Interestingly, at a time when “dual aspirations” has started to join “marginal gains” as a key phrase in the lexicon of elite athletes, Pinner and Hunter have both taken jobs outside hockey, Pinner as an insurance broker and Hunter as an accountant. It’s partly financial — Hunter doesn’t have a full-time contract — but mostly choice. “‘Dual aspirations’ is a phrase we’re hearing a lot more now,” says Pinner. “In lifestyle reviews now, you have to show you’re doing something outside sport. I’m the only one in the squad who’s doing something outside playing and coaching and I believe that’s why I’m still going strong. If I came home and hockey was my whole life, I’d find that unhealthy.”
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Hunter’s ambition, fuelled by the success of the GB team in Rio, is to turn her strong club form into international permanence, but she has been on the outside long enough now to temper her expectations. “In Rio, I could watch the final with a different view because I hadn’t been involved for a few years,” she says. “But that definitely motivated me to try and get that chance for myself. Anything I do now in my career is a bonus and anything else is not really a setback. That’s just my outlook. I’ve seen the other side of it when I’ve not been in the team and now I just can’t believe my luck.”
When they face Argentina at the Olympic hockey centre on Saturday, England’s women will take on the mantle of British Olympic champions, whether they like it or not. The match against Holland the following day, billed as a repeat of the Olympic final, has sold out. “Our mantra is ‘winning after winning’ and we talk a lot about how to do that,” says Hunter. “It does feel like a completely different team, but it still feels like we must be winning.”
Talk of hockey is not exactly banned in the Pinner-Hunter household, it’s just that time they do spend together is too precious to be wasted on the subject. Somehow work and sport dovetail. On Saturdays, they head separately for their club matches, Pinner to Holcombe, Hunter to Surbiton. Their honeymoon has been postponed until September. As they set off for different training camps and matches, club or country, the message is always the same: “Enjoy it.” By the end of Tokyo 2020, they might truly be hockey’s golden couple.
ON TV SATURDAY
England women v Argentina women
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