Lives in Cricket No 14 - Jack Bond

Jack Bond Lancashire Lad, Lancashire Leader DOUGLAS MILLER LIVES IN CRICKET ACS PUBLICATIONS £12.00 Jack Bond ensured his place in cricket history with a spectacular, match-winning catch at Lord’s. It brought Lancashire the second of three consecutive Gillette Cups, and with two John Player titles the team he led were the one-day masters of their day. Yet Jack Bond’s story is one in which triumphs have been interlaced with struggles, misfortune and tragedy. On the verge of being released, he began his five-year reign as skipper ‘while we look for someone else’. His Methodist beliefs – ‘it’s all about helping others’ – shaped his captaincy style. With self-interest banished from the dressing room, the Bond regime saw the team come first, the game enjoyed and spectators never forgotten. Five blissful years as a school coach in the Isle of Man, a less happy return to Lancashire as manager in the 1980s, then ten years as a first-class umpire with winters now spent accompanying tour parties overseas and summers preparing practice pitches at Old Trafford – Jack Bond’s has long been a ‘life in cricket’. It is a life he has helped the author record with the warmth and humour that have always characterised this true Lancashire lad.