Lives in Cricket No 14 - Jack Bond

Chapter Twelve ‘Nobody ever locked their doors’ The idea that Jack should take up a coaching position at Old Trafford had long been in the minds of those charged with running Lancashire’s cricket and, with the retirement of Buddy Oldfield, it was decided that he should be appointed coach with John Savage as his assistant. It was not quite the arrangement that Jack would have wished. His preference was for an umbrella role allowing him to retain an interest in the first-class game, but he agreed to become joint coach with Savage. During that summer he played in most of the second-team matches under the captaincy of Eddie Slinger, while taking full command for Lancashire’s Under-25 games. ‘It didn’t work out,’ he now admits, and an arrangement that had been expected to last for at least three years came to an end after only one, with Jack disenchanted to learn later that his name had been canvassed as a Test selector that summer, but that Lancashire had not been prepared to propose him. ‘They said no, he’s got enough on his plate. It didn’t get through the committee by one vote.’ In a varied career that would never venture far from cricket for the rest of his working life and beyond, the next summer saw Jack back as a first-class player, moving from his beloved Old Trafford to Nottinghamshire. ‘I’d become friendly with Jack Baddiley and John Heatley at Trent Bridge, and I’d played against Jack when I’d been in the second team and he’d been the Notts captain. He asked me to go there as cricket manager and to captain the side.’ For six years Nottinghamshire had been captained by Garfield Sobers. He had immediately revived the fortunes of a club that had taken the wooden spoon for two of the three seasons prior to his arrival, but by 1974 the lower reaches of the table were beckoning once more, in what was to be Sobers’ last summer. Notts had seen a formula that had worked at Old Trafford and hoped that it might work for them, but even the best of captains have sell-by dates and 115