Lives in Cricket No 14 - Jack Bond

order or never give them a decent bowl, what’s the good of that? I always liked to think of myself as a chance maker.’ The concept that advice should pass only in one direction was not the Jack Bond philosophy. ‘Jack never made a move without consulting me,’ says Farokh Engineer. ‘I knew the conditions and I could see how people were bowling better than anyone else.’ Sometimes it would be little more than a nod and field adjustments would be made. ‘We had a very good rapport and it was a tremendous feeling when we tried a change and it came off.’ The notion that junior players should be kept in their place was anathema to Jack. ‘You never stop listening to anybody. It can be the youngest lad in the dressing room. You can be captain and suddenly he’s said something and you think, yes that’s right. You should never stop listening to anybody – I don’t care who they are or how little they’ve played.’ Where uncapped players, confined to their downstairs quarters, had once knocked timidly on the senior dressing-room door, now they were re-housed upstairs in what had been the opposition’s room with visiting teams moved downstairs. ‘There was great humour and practical jokes,’ says Farokh Engineer. ‘We all enjoyed each other’s company.’ This strong bonding helped give the side its identity in the field, enhanced by the importance Jack always gave to this side of the game. ‘I’ve always enjoyed fielding. I couldn’t understand why anybody else couldn’t enjoy it. You spend more time in a cricket match in the field than you do batting. I know for a fact that I was often in the Lancashire side because I was a better fielder than somebody else.’ Encouraging his players to dive for the ball, not common practice at the time, he stressed that one run saved per man was ten fewer to chase. Barry Wood, betraying his Yorkshire origins, was an initial sceptic. ‘Who is going to be cleaning all these grass stains off our flannels?’ Jack Simmons remembers him asking. Jack Bond’s response was to find a sponsor, Brian Melville, an avid Lancashire supporter, who took on responsibility for the cleaning of the team’s flannels and shirts. For many years he was there after each match to collect all the whites and he would return them a couple of days later to the dressing room, neatly pressed and on hangers. Simmons pays tribute to Jack as ‘the best man manager I ever played for’ and he gives an example from a match against Kent: ‘He tried Lever, Shuttleworth, Wood, Hughes and some of them had ‘The finest captain I played under’ 113