Lives in Cricket No 14 - Jack Bond

wickets. Jack recalls the pressure as he calculated the moment to bring the Lancashire innings to a close, with the Glamorgan secretary and former captain pacing up and down. ‘Wilf Wooller was prowling along that top balcony where the two dressing rooms were, chuntering and muttering and saying, “You’re killing the game, Lancashire. You should have declared twenty minutes ago.”’ Jack eventually set Glamorgan 178 in 130 minutes, a target that the Welsh side reached thanks to a superbly paced 95 not out by Alan Jones. There were two more draws before the season ended on a high note, with a pair of wins at Old Trafford. First Gloucestershire were defeated by four wickets with three balls left, Jack once again at the crease on 38 having made a useful 35 in the first innings. Then his 44 helped to build a substantial first innings lead before Essex were comfortably beaten by nine wickets. Just five runs were needed to secure the win. The pages of Wisden reveal that the wicket to fall was that of Peter Lever. It brings a smile to Jack’s face: ‘That’s typical Peter. “I’ll go in and knock them off.” I suppose he hadn’t taken too many wickets!’ There had been eight wins in the Championship against six losses. Lancashire’s strong finish had lifted them to sixth place in the table, the highest for eight years. Jack now looks back and remembers how apprehensive he had been at the outset. ‘You’re bound to be aren’t you? A new captain, a side that’s not been doing too well for a few years. It was an exciting time, but everybody was a little bit nervous at the start.’ The initial objective had been to avoid losing. ‘What I wanted to do in my captaincy early on was to try to get us to draw games initially. Because we had got into the habit of losing – I’m not saying not caring about losing – but you get into a habit and we had lost a lot of games over four or five years. If you can’t win, you make damn sure you don’t lose – that was the attitude I wanted to instil in them, the same attitude that we’d had in the second eleven.’ Then the wins had come. ‘Gradually the last five or six games of the season the dressing room was unbelievable. There was a real buzz about it and an excitement and a real feeling of team spirit, and everybody wanting everybody else in the side to do well.’ It was a notable season too in other ways. For the first time there had there been no points for a first innings lead. Instead, bonus points had been introduced for runs made and wickets taken in 70 ‘You’ll have to have all your teeth out’