Lives in Cricket No 14 - Jack Bond

The Lord’s game was a match dominated by pace bowlers, with the Australian Alan Connolly principally responsible for dismissing Lancashire for 91, in which Jack, with 31 not out, was one of only two batsmen to reach double figures. There were six cheap wickets for Higgs as Middlesex could do no more than draw level. David Lloyd and Graham Atkinson, playing only championship matches in his final year, then laid a painstaking platform at the start of Lancashire’s second innings as the batsmen ground their way to 173. Caution remained the watchword as Middlesex sought 174 for victory. Graham Barlow, later to play three Tests for England but now a 19-year-old taking part in his first championship match, was batting at number six. He had watched the last of the established batsmen depart and continued to play patiently as Lancashire worked their way through his tail-end partners. By the time Lever prepared to bowl the final over, his thirtieth of the innings, Barlow had been joined by last man Connolly. ‘We got it wrong in the last over,’ Jack now relates. ‘We’d got Graham Barlow facing the last over when they’d got nine down. Peter Lever was bowling to him, and he’d bowled all afternoon. He bowled five balls and we couldn’t get him out. Then, in desperation, he bowled a bouncer – the very last ball of the game. Graham Barlow, God bless him, shouldered arms and it hit him and dropped straight onto the stumps. He’d played magnificently. We were all highly delighted, but I can honestly say I was sorry for Graham.’ There was to be a sequel. Sir Neville Cardus, soon to be Lancashire’s president, knocked on the dressing-room door and asked for the captain. Sir Neville was invited in. ‘We were stood there in this big room. There’s Peter Lever and myself and Farokh Engineer and Neville Cardus. And he said, “I just wanted to say that was a magnificent piece of bowling, the best I’ve seen in a decade, Peter. Aren’t you proud to be a Lancastrian?” Peter looked at me and he looked at him, and he said, “I’m sorry, Sir Neville, I was born in Todmorden on the Yorkshire side.” And Farokh said, “These bloody foreigners!”’ ‘And there was this new competition’ 79