Lives in Cricket No 14 - Jack Bond

Chapter Eleven ‘The finest captain I played under’ Jack was 40 when the 1972 season began. He had glimpsed the summit in the past two seasons, but the Championship had proved elusive. He still had the same players around him and to their number had now been added Peter Lee from Northants, as cover in case Lever and Shuttleworth should be called for Test duty. Seen at first as a questionable signing, Lee would go on to serve with distinction and be chosen, in 1976, as one of Wisden’s Cricketers of the Year. As the summer unfolded, Jack began to accept that it would probably be his last as a first-team player. ‘I couldn’t maintain the standard in the field that I’d expected of everybody when we first started,’ he says. Perhaps, too, his captaincy was getting a bit stale: ‘As a school coach you are saying the same things every year to a different group of boys, but now I was saying the same things as I was saying five years ago to the same group of people.’ It was soon clear that there would be no fairy-tale ending in the Championship, where only two matches were won against three losses, and Lancashire sank to fifteenth. In a wretchedly wet summer, when the North-West always suffers disproportionately, no side drew more matches, but as if to show the wisdom of signing Lee, both Lever and Shuttleworth bowled below par in a season when too few bowling points were earned. Jack’s own batting seldom fired, though he gave one nostalgic glimpse of his best with an undefeated 103 against Middlesex at Lord’s, his only three-figure score in his years as captain. It came on a pitch of ‘variable bounce’ from which Wood had earlier been taken to hospital, and was only made possible by a partnership of 78 for the last wicket with Lee, whose 18 was his highest score of the season. The one-day competitions offered the side more hope. But there was a quarter-final exit from the new Benson and Hedges Cup and only eighth place was achieved in the Sunday League, where it was agreed in mid-season that Jack should stand down from the 108