Lives in Cricket No 14 - Jack Bond

they could say, “I am a member of the Lancashire Committee.”’ Committee workings were seen to worst effect when it came to team selection. He formed the impression that members of all committees, and perhaps vice-presidents as well, had their penny’s worth at the Selection Committee deliberations. They met at 3pm, amply wined and dined and, when they were ready to pronounce, the captain was summoned. ‘I was astonished by my first experience,’ Bob says. ‘Vino tended to make even those of limited cricket background rather vociferous! Thirty to forty around a table!’ For the second year of his captaincy, at Bob’s instigation, a different structure was introduced, with a selection committee of three: a chairman, Frank Sibbles, coach Stan Worthington and the captain. However, the new arrangement did not prevent the captain receiving a message that, at a time when Statham was absent on Test duty, he was to send Ken Higgs home for a rest. Though he had shown poorer form than in 1960, Higgs’ own view of the matter was that it was because he needed more bowling! After such experiences, Bob admits that ‘some of my enthusiasm and my interest in the captaincy died.’ A couple of years later, after he had made his move to Warwickshire, Ken Grieves, then the Lancashire skipper, invited Bob for ‘a beer and a bite’ with Brian Statham and himself. ‘That evening they both said to me – and there was no reason for Brian to do so – that they were deeply sorry for all that had happened. “We did not realise until now what you had to put up with.” A treasured memory!’ Having decided to relieve Bob Barber of the captaincy, in what was to be the last year of the amateur in English cricket, the committee turned to a 34-year-old club cricketer as captain. They hoped that Joe Blackledge might achieve for Lancashire what Ronnie Burnet had managed when he had taken control of a divided Yorkshire team and won the Championship in his second season. Blackledge was not quite the lame duck he has sometimes been painted. In 33 games for the second team in the early 1950s he had averaged 35 with two centuries. But his last match had been in 1953 and he had no experience of the first-class game. ‘If they’d wanted him to captain the side, it should have been five or six years earlier,’ says Jack, looking back on a dismal chapter in the history of a great club. ‘Bob Barber had had no support from the senior professionals, none at all. They didn’t want him – they ‘After all, it’s only a friendly match’ 43