Growing older, but never old

PAUL EDWARDS: Jack Simmons turned 80 on March 28. And these words are being written barely two miles from an Old Trafford he might struggle to recognise as the one on which he played so joyously

“You can't help getting older, but you don't have to get old,” said the American comedian, George Burns. Damn right. I’ve known undergraduates who might as well be in their forties and septuagenarians with decades ahead of them. All the same, it is a sign of the miles on my own clock when the mention of a player I watched in my youth elicits merely polite smiles from friends who have only read about the glory days of Lancashire cricket or glimpsed them on fragments of film.

My adolescence was spent in Manchester and we lived a few miles from Old Trafford, which became my second home; “first home” my parents said and maybe it was fortunate there wasn’t a hotel on the ground in those days. It was clear to me that the County Championship was the best competition to win but the early 1970s were also an era in which Lancashire had a fine limited-overs side; so fine, indeed, that trips to Lord’s finals became something of an annual ritual.

It is not over-egging the pudding to say that the Lancashire crowd loved those players or that the feeling was reciprocated. David Lloyd reckoned the two groups formed an informal alliance against the committee, some of whom were uncordially despised.

The fondness was partly explained by the fact that the majority of the players were locals and had played in the leagues. One, in particular, looked rather like a club cricketer and had served an apprenticeship as a draughtsman before making his first-class debut, aged 27, at Stanley Park, Blackpool, where he was the pro. Jack Simmons was one of our own.

No one said as much, of course. Only in modern Premier League football has it become so unusual for local players to make good that the fact is thought worthy of a chant. Yet when people saw Jack clump the ball into the outfield and bustle down the wicket like a desk sergeant in pursuit of a miscreant they were deluded into believing that if things had fallen out a smidgeon differently they might also be wearing the Red Rose.

The fairly clear truth that this was one of the best off-spinners in the land – and a far more subtle bowler than his nickname, “Flat Jack” suggested – was overlooked. (One is reminded of Ray Illingworth’s shrewd observation that if a slow bowler’s variations are clear on the boundary, they will be obvious indeed to the batsman, who will play his shot accordingly.)

^{Jack Simmons (right) was a Wisden Cricketer of the Year in 1985}

Jack’s great days with Lancashire – the three successive Gillette Cup wins, the two John Player League titles and the Benson and Hedges triumph – have been described at some length elsewhere. They are also lovingly recalled by Jack himself in his autobiography Flat Jack, which is, for the most part, a chronicle of good luck and gratitude to a game that gave him a comfortable life.

It is a part of Lancastrian folklore that he bowled the ball off which Asif Iqbal was athletically caught by Jack Bond, thereby turning the 1971 Gillette Final in Lancashire’s favour.

What remains less well known is that Jack took over a thousand first-class wickets, 985 of them for Lancashire; or that he also enjoyed a second successful career with Tasmania; or that far from being the biffer I implied earlier, he scored 9,417 first-class runs, a tally that included six centuries.

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For a fuller picture of Jack readers could do no better than consult Graeme Fowler’s first book, Fox on the Run, which is a diary of the opener’s cricket from November 1984 to April 1986. In the entry for April 30, 1985 there is this:

Simmo trains on fish and chips – along with tea and cigarettes. He is probably one of the most popular people in cricket. I don’t know anyone who dislikes him and he is one of the nicest people ever to play the game. He has been one of the great characters of Lancashire cricket, an outstanding slow bowler in the one-day game and a great asset with the bat.

He is completely unprofessional, he is never on time, thinks a net is something to do with fishing and his diet is something no professional sportsman could imagine. He hates going to bed before midnight, but once in bed hates getting up…You can spend as much time as you want talking about cricket, and he will always help you…He is a great thinker about the game, but I reckon what happens to him is that he can see so many points of view that at the end of the day he doesn’t know what he thinks.

There are other sections about Jack in the book and I’m not going to nick any more of them. Fox on the Run is still a fine read about how it was – God help me – nearly 40 years ago. And everyone has their own memories of Jack’s playing days. He gave of himself to a degree barely imaginable in these media-conscious days and he never did so more delightedly than when Lancashire were playing at an outground.

^{Emirates Old Trafford has changed a lot since Simmons' playing days...}

After one day of a game at Southport he was enjoying a post-match drink when there was a sudden noise at the end of the bar. A member who had enjoyed himself far too much had finally given gravity best and was sliding slowly to earth with his pint in his hand.

He had his back to the fruit machine and eventually landed with a soft thump on the pavilion floor. There was a deep silence. Jack had strong views about such behaviour. He put down his glass and led the company in a round of applause. “Magnificent!” he enthused. “Never spilt a drop.”

There are other stories about Jack, probably hundreds of them. Some have grown in the telling but none have devalued the stature of the man, his multifarious appetites, his passion for company or his absolute love of the game.

Perhaps my favourite Neville Cardus quotation comes at the end of his piece about Tom Richardson, a Golden Age fast bowler to whom life after cricket was not particularly kind. Cardus wrote this: “Cricketers like Richardson ought never to know of old age. Every springtime ought to find them newborn, like the green world they live in.”

And now it is another April, another springtime, another green world. Jack was 80 on March 28. Older, but never old, I hope. And these words are being written barely two miles from an Old Trafford Jack might struggle to recognise as the one on which he played so joyously.

Yet it is hardly the work of a moment to knock down The Point, demolish the new Hotel and flatten the Players and Media Centre. Instead we have a separate Ladies’ Pavilion and some other stands that have never been things of beauty. It is a Sunday afternoon and Jack Bond is leading his players out of the famous, red-brick pavilion that dwarfs every other building on the ground. We shall let Edmund Blunden supply the words from his poem “The Season Opens”:

A labourer leans on a stackyard’s low wall
With the hens bothering round him, and dreams bat and ball;

Till the meadow is quick with the masters who were,
And he hears his own shouts when he first trotted there;
Long ago, all gone home now; but here they come all!
Surely these are the same, who now bring bat and ball?

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