Lives in Cricket No 48 - Maurice Leyland

144 Many happy returns These comments from Maurice’s pupils would not have come as a surprise to his old Harrogate pal Jim Kilburn for in 1939, in a series for the Yorkshire Post , he talked to Kilburn about his ideas. Firstly he stated that he believed that any boy, given normal intelligence and physical fitness, can be developed into a good cricketer. That statement did, however, carry the proviso that the boy in question should still be in the ‘hero-worshipping’ stage and therefore at his most receptive. Kilburn went on to explain that Maurice would, ‘show his pupil how to hold the bat, then leave him for a time to his own devices, merely instructing him to hit the ball according to his own inclinations’ and that his view of the coach was to, ‘instil all possible confidence into the pupil, and develop the talents that come most easily’. Maurice went on to talk about the importance of ‘footwork’ for a batsman and ‘line and length’ for a bowler, all pretty routine coaching manual stuff, but then introduced more common sense when he suggested that he would take his pupil, ‘to watch first- class cricket, point out the different types of batsman, then pit him against better players at the earliest opportunity and have him try out what he had learned from others’. Most of the players to emerge from the Yorkshire colts during Maurice’s time as coach hold dear some specific words of wisdom that he shared with them - in some cases it was the same words. Both Dickie Bird and Geoff Boycott, on the question of fast bowling, recall him telling them: ‘None of us likes playing against fast bowling - but some of us don’t let on!’ Some have a debt of gratitude they felt they could never repay. For example, Bryan Stott, who scored nearly 10,000 runs in a 12- year career, states quite categorically: “If it wasn’t for Maurice Leyland I would never have seen the inside of a Yorkshire dressing room!” Recalling his very early days at the Yorkshire nets he explained: I was about 14 when I first started at Headingley and I was with Arthur. Now, I used to like to flash outside the off stick and though it brought me runs I also got out to it occasionally. Arthur, quite simply, told me to ‘cut it out’. But, I couldn’t.