Lives in Cricket No 14 - Jack Bond

victory, Jack still felt confident of winning: ‘I never thought that they’d got enough runs, though it was one of the bigger totals at the time,’ he says. He was not to know the impact the lost hour would have on the game. There was 50 from Wood and, with the other early batsmen all making useful contributions, Lancashire were well placed at 160 for four. Off-spinner John Mortimore then bowled Clive Lloyd and he claimed a second wicket three runs later when Engineer hit his stumps in completing his shot. At 163 for six, with two new batsmen at the crease and the light starting to deteriorate, it was a different story. At 7.30 the umpires could have called the game off for the day, but their instructions encouraged them to complete it if at all possible, so play continued. Jack was at the wicket with Simmons as the light got steadily worse. He had not bargained for this when he had won the toss and he could still have come off. But although he now feared that Lancashire would be beaten, he preferred to give the crowd its money’s worth. ‘With the ground jam-packed full, it would have been such an anticlimax to continue the match the following day.’ In light that Wisden described as ‘murky to the say the least’ Simmons was striking the ball well. ‘It was getting darker and darker,’ Jack recalls. ‘And they were taking longer and longer to bowl their overs. But they were also getting very tired because they’d had to field for close to 50 overs without a break.’ The two Jacks had added 40 in seven overs when Mortimore struck again, bowling Simmons. Twenty-seven were needed from the last six overs when David Hughes came in. Only Lever and Shuttleworth were to follow. ‘We were obviously going to finish now,’ says Jack. ‘We’d have got lynched if we’d gone off then with four or five overs still to go. We had to carry on. Our hands were tied; we’d got no choice. It looked as though we were going to get beaten, but we also knew that they were having difficulty seeing the ball.’ Hughes came down the wicket to meet Jack. ‘Do you think we can win?’ he asked his skipper. ‘I said, “You’ve got to give it a go. You can hit it.” He said, “If I can see it, I’ll hit it.”’ Mortimore, an accomplished Test bowler, had taken Gloucestershire to the brink of victory. But now, Jack reckons, his opponents made the wrong decision. ‘They played into our hands because they kept with ‘A great catch to end a great innings’ 101