Lives in Cricket No 14 - Jack Bond

Chapter Eight ‘And there was this new competition’ When the Lancashire players assembled for the start of the 1969 season they no longer had a caretaker captain. The decision to re-appoint Jack Bond had been unanimous in the cricket committee. Meanwhile, without Statham and Pullar and with Savage moving into a coaching role, the side increasingly bore the hallmark of its captain. The mood was upbeat. ‘We were expecting everything would be all rosy and we’d climb even further up the County Championship,’ Jack says. ‘We were obviously looking to do better in the Gillette. And there was this new competition.’ This new competition! In 1969, spurred on by the interest aroused by televised Sunday matches played by the Rothmans International Cavaliers, the TCCB had devised a 40-over competition for the counties. Branded in its first year as the John Player’s County League, but soon to become the John Player League and be widely known as the JPL, it was also to be played on Sundays. As with the Gillette in its early days, and later with Twenty20 cricket, there were many counties who raised little enthusiasm for a game so far removed from their customary first-class fare. Jack remembers Brian Close saying that ‘it wasn’t a proper game of cricket’ and that senior players in some of the counties preferred to have Sunday off rather than have to play. But Jack saw it differently: ‘We had three chances to win a trophy.’ It would not be long before Lancashire’s chances had receded in two of the competitions. The championship programme began with a string of draws – 21 of Lancashire’s 24 matches in 1969 were drawn – and hopes in the Gillette evaporated at the first hurdle in early June as Yorkshire cruised to victory by seven wickets at Old Trafford. ‘So the whole season revolved around the new competition,’ Jack recalls, adding that ‘it wasn’t intended that way at all.’ The defeat by Yorkshire was not for want of planning. The small selection committee had identified the principal danger. ‘It was all about how to get John Hampshire out,’ Jack remembers. ‘Get him 72