Lives in Cricket No 14 - Jack Bond

bowler will be running in with the wind behind him and it’ll be difficult down that end.’ Jack was brought up in an age when batsmen took much of the pressure off the umpire. ‘If you hit it, you walk,’ had been the way Stan Worthington had schooled the young professionals. ‘You could count the people on one hand in English cricket who didn’t walk,’ says Jack. And a fielder’s word on a catch was accepted. From Jack’s time at Old Trafford in the 1980s, Steve O’Shaughnessy, now himself an umpire, learned that this was still the ethos when his manager sent him to apologise to Arthur Jepson after he had made a gesture to show that a ball had brushed his shoulder not his bat. By the 1990s it had all changed. Few players were any longer helping the umpires with their decisions, and Jack was disappointed to find that some of those with whom he had played were tempted to cheat as their careers threatened to be drawing to a close. Now the game he watches has more aggravation, and for this, he blames the captains. ‘I don’t think they are doing their job on the field sometimes.’ Jack’s involvement in umpiring brought him an invitation to travel to Argentina as assistant manager of an MCC party captained by the Sussex and England batsman Paul Parker and managed by John Jameson, Assistant Secretary (Cricket) at Lord’s. It was a time of ‘He’ll cook the bacon sandwiches’ 131 John Higson, chairman of Gloucestershire, toasts Barry Meyer and Jack on their retirement from the first-class umpires panel in 1997.