Lives in Cricket No 14 - Jack Bond

taken Higgs, the last of the old guard, into league cricket at Blackpool, placing a greater burden on Lever and Shuttleworth. So it was often Lloyd who would step into the breach if either was away. To some outsiders it was a surprise that a West Indian and an Indian could blend so happily into a county dressing room. They did not know Clive Lloyd and Farokh Engineer! Lloyd had already experienced the warmth of Lancashire hospitality when he had signed as professional with Haslingden in the Lancashire League. A black man stood out on the streets of the town, but he says, ‘I have always felt comfortable in Lancashire, because I was always made to feel welcome. I was treated so well.’ So it would be when he arrived at Old Trafford, where he immediately warmed to Jack’s style of captaincy and the dressing-room humour. ‘And Florence was lovely,’ he says. ‘She used to wash all my underwear, and there aren’t many county captains’ wives you can say that about.’ It was business as usual as the season began at Old Trafford with an eight-wicket victory over Middlesex in the John Player League, but this year there was a more encouraging start for the older members – a championship win against Leicestershire at Old Trafford, in which Jack played an important part. With Lancashire needing 165, the match was in the balance at 71 for four when he came in, but his 42 in an unbroken partnership with Engineer steered the county home by six wickets on the second evening. Leicestershire had also capitulated in the Sunday game by 92 runs, so the campaign had started well on two fronts. Later that week the team set off for Kent, where a championship match began on the Saturday at Dartford before the teams moved to Beckenham for a Sunday league match that was to end in controversy. With rain around, the match had been reduced to 35 overs, from which Lancashire, helped by a breezy 32 from Jack, scored 202 for seven. Soon after the Kent innings began ‘in Stygian gloom and under threatening skies,’ the rain began to fall more steadily. ‘We could have come off after three or four overs,’ Jack reckons, but the Lancashire players stayed on until, at the end of the ninth over and with the score on 58 for one, they were surprised to see the batsmen heading triumphantly for the pavilion, leaving fielders and umpires in the middle, the rain now falling steadily. In the early days of the competition, before the brilliantly conceived but unfathomable mystery of the Duckworth-Lewis ‘They stormed the gates to get in’ 81