Lives in Cricket No 14 - Jack Bond

remembers his inspirational leadership in 1956, always encouraging and happy to make suggestions but never dictating. Jack remembered Edrich’s influence off the field with his young charges in the second eleven: how they would go back to the hotel and talk about the day’s play and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the opposing batsmen or the way to play their best bowlers. ‘Geoff would talk cricket day in, day out, night in, night out. About half past nine you’d probably go out for a curry or fish and chips, then to bed. But Geoff’d stay up till the early hours of the morning. He’d stay up all night with anybody to talk cricket.’ When Geoff Edrich left Old Trafford, carrying the can for some high-spirited behaviour from his second team, it was yet another sad and needless ending of a loyal career. And it meant the departure of a man who influenced Jack’s appreciation of the game’s more subtle twists. Cricket is a ‘situations game’, Jack believes. ‘You get situations that repeat themselves time and again over the years. The secret is to recognize them when they occur, and hopefully you’ve got the people in your side to deal with them.’ Edrich was always a positive captain, and Jack followed him in abhorring games that were allowed to drift, as if the only objective was getting the day over and into the bar. When Jack took up the reins, there were a few seasoned professionals on whom he could still call, but all would soon move on and he feels he was lucky to have taken on a mainly young side with players most of whom he knew well. ‘When I took over as captain, a lot of the players had only one way to look and that was towards me. As senior pro I’d been on the staff a long time and a lot of them were young lads I’d brought up through the second eleven in the previous three years. So if I said something, they virtually took it as gospel.’ All this was a far cry from the problems Bob Barber had faced and which had characterised Lancashire’s cricket in the early sixties, when the ‘heavy brigade’ had held sway. Jack recalls the unhealthy attitude: ‘If you get a very unsuccessful side, though it may have talented players in it, the next best thing for some of the players, if they haven’t had too good a day on the field, is to make sure they have a good night off it, especially when playing away from home, where they can get away with it.’ Could Jack have risen to the challenge if this had been the dominant culture of the team he inherited? He finds it difficult to ‘You’ll have to have all your teeth out’ 63