Lives in Cricket No 14 - Jack Bond

wanted one of their own. Of course it made it even worse when they appointed Joe.’ Ken Grieves, who had been eyeing the captaincy for himself, departed. Barber, preferring to avoid a charge of sour grapes, stayed on. Blackledge did his best. ‘He had a hard time,’ says Jack, ‘and he was a lovely fellow. You could sense that he felt everything was against him, various instructions from the committee and so forth, but he never let it get him down.’ With only two championship matches won while 16 were lost, poor Joe Blackledge lasted just one season before Ken Grieves was persuaded out of his brief retirement to take on the job he had yearned for some time. Jack always regarded the new captain as a fine batsman and a man who enjoyed the game. He was a knowledgeable cricketer, Jack felt, and one who came in determined to prove the committee wrong in not appointing him earlier. But Grieves would soon learn that the object of his ambition was a poisoned chalice. He continued to preside over an unhappy dressing room, and his first season brought little success on the field with only Marner and the captain himself passing a thousand runs. Of the principal run-getters from the previous summer, Barber had departed to Warwickshire, where 44 ‘After all, it’s only a friendly match’ Lancashire’s captains. Bob Barber, in 1960 and 1961, and Joe Blackledge in 1962.