Lives in Cricket No 14 - Jack Bond

watching a television monitor. ‘You were just a ball carrier. The only time you would get on was if someone was taken ill.’ For Jack it was another happy period of his life. He enjoyed the chance to watch good players from ‘the best seat in the house’, though he had to train himself to avoid becoming too absorbed in the ebbs and flows of the game to the detriment of the job he was supposed to be doing. He reflects on the changes he has seen that made the job less convivial than it had once been. In his playing days, when there had been no television in hotel rooms, he had been used to finding the likes of Charlie Elliott, Jack Crapp, Bill Copson and Ron Aspinall in the bar at the team’s hotel. ‘They were happy to be among cricketers.’ In the modern game there is less fraternising, and Jack’s own philosophy is that ‘it’s a dangerous practice, to be having a drink with somebody one night and giving him out first ball next morning.’ With less mixing with the players at close of play, an umpire looks to his colleague for companionship. ‘The first thing you look at when you get your fixtures is not who the match is against but who you are standing with.’ A potentially lonely life, travelling alone up the motorways, is eased by reuniting with a good friend at the ground. ‘You’re glad to be standing with someone like Jack with his marvellous sense of humour,’ says Bob White, just as Jack himself would relish three days with ‘Knocker’ and many others on the list. Sometimes his fellow umpire lived close enough to get home for the night, and Jack then preferred to avoid larger hotels in favour of the family atmosphere of a farm or bed-and-breakfast. On the field Jack learned to be philosophical. ‘You’ve got to get it out of your head that you are going to get everything right,’ he says. Players’ expressions, not necessarily in open dissent, can make an umpire realise that he has made a wrong decision. ‘And there’s nothing worse than on the first morning of a three-day game when you get something wrong and you realise quite quickly that you got it wrong, and you think there’s another three days to go. It can play on your mind.’ Players do not always realise, Jack feels, that when conditions are difficult for batting with the ball seaming around, they are also difficult for umpiring. But some of the umpires do! ‘There’s always one end that’s the business end, and there’s one or two senior umpires who are quite cute. They know which end there’s a gale blowing, so they’ll go and stand at the other end! Because the fast 130 ‘He’ll cook the bacon sandwiches’