Lives in Cricket No 48 - Maurice Leyland

142 Yorkshire, meanwhile, were to experience something of a lull in their fortunes as they attempted to adjust to the loss of so many great players at once. Skipper Brian Sellers had lost Leyland, Barber, Turner (retired) and Gibb from the previous year’s title winning side having already lost Sutcliffe, Mitchell, Verity and Wood, for the 1946 season. It was to prove too much. The side finished in eighth place that year although they did come back under the captaincy of Yardley to take fourth spot in 1948 and then, in 1949, share the championship jointly with Middlesex before slipping to third in 1950. It was during March of 1951 that Maurice experienced the next major change in his life. With the coaching role at Headingley rapidly expanding beyond net practice, to include supervision, lectures and demonstrations in schools, and the coaching of coaches, it was decided that the time had come for someone to join Arthur Mitchell on the staff and Maurice was offered the job. It was something which he had always done informally with younger players and he had some very clear ideas about how the job should be done. He took up his new post on Monday, April 1, as the first team reported to Headingley for the first day of their pre-season preparations, and it was clear that the committee had found themselves with a top class ‘good cop-bad cop’ team in the nets. “I worked mostly with ‘Ticker’ and the two were like chalk and cheese,” recalled a later coach, Doug Padgett. Ticker would tear into you and give you a bollocking but you’d never hear Maurice doing that. Maurice was very kind, some would say perhaps too kind, and he was always looking to give you encouragement - that was probably his greatest asset. He was a big believer in the idea that coaching was about getting people to perform and not all about finding fault. Peter Chadwick remembers that when he was at the Yorkshire nets everyone wanted to be in Maurice’s net: Arthur was stern and abrupt and would stop you regularly to show you just what you should be doing. If you had a 15 minute Many happy returns