Lives in Cricket No 20 - Maurice Tompkin

break at the end of the cricket season, before turning out for Kettering. However the real reason was that his back problem needed rest to recover, and that was precisely what he was doing. Perhaps the club management wanted to keep it secret that last year’s big-named signing was not as fit as they would like and they did not want to lose face, though club president W.B.Wright was involving specialists in an attempt to sort out the injury. He scored a goal in his first match of the 1948/49 season, an FA Cup preliminary match against Desborough Town, another close rival, but as in the previous year they suffered defeat at the hands of Peterborough in the next round in the following week. Again, no specific criticism of Maurice except that ‘there was little plan in the attack’. There followed a string of Birmingham League victories in the run-up to Christmas, with periodic goals by Maurice. As with the previous season, he demonstrated his versatility by switching between the No.10 and No.8 shirts. He did not, however, have Christmas day off this year. Leicester City ‘A’, who had joined the Birmingham League this season, were the opponents at home. Maybe Maurice could not resist playing against his old club, to show them what they were missing, or maybe it was felt that he would add a few hundred to the gate and pressure was put on him to play. With an 11.45 am kick-off, he could still play Santa to his young sons Chris and Nick and be home by 4 pm. The result was a 9-0 victory for Kettering. Maurice did not get on the score sheet, but a cross to Connelly made the sixth goal, in front of a crowd of 2,728, below average for the season up to that point. But Christmas was still a busy sporting time. His brother-in-law Geoff was a good rugby player, and made his debut at fly half for the Leicester Tigers over Christmas, and played in his first ‘Barbarians’ match on 29 December. This was very much the big sporting event of the Leicester Christmas holiday, and often seen as a chance by some of the up-and-coming players to make a name for themselves before the internationals started. As the season progressed, the admittedly brief reports by ‘The Friar’ in the Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph make little mention of Maurice’s contributions: Kettering are ‘having another good season’, and are ‘doing well in both league and the Northamptonshire Cup’, which created a great deal of local interest. That Maurice was still in the public eye was the news in January that a Football League club were keen to sign ‘Dunkley, Woolhead, Tompkin and Mitchell’, but the Kettering board were not interested. The intensity of local football can be seen by the Northamptonshire Cup semi-final against local rivals Wellingborough, affectionately known as the ‘Doughmen’, probably on account of the enormous Whitworth Flour Mills which dominate the landscape as you come upon the town from the south. In a physical match, watched by a crowd of 5,000, Kettering won 3-0, with all their goals penalties. As Wellingborough’s best chance of a goal was a missed penalty, the newspaper’s comment that the referee had a hard job Football winters 42