Lives in Cricket No 48 - Maurice Leyland

153 Against the odds retiring but the reason. For anyone who knew him it was clear that his illness was proving more of a handicap every year and he had never made a secret of it. In fact he would even raise the subject himself and make light of it with odd quips. But, suddenly, a smokescreen appeared. Both the Yorkshire Post and the Harrogate Advertiser attributed his incapacity to a pre-war injury. Even Jim Kilburn, chief cricket correspondent of the Post and one of Maurice’s closest friends, wrote: Leyland, 62, is relinquishing his appointment as chief coach on the grounds of ill-health. A shoulder injury incurred in the West Indies has greatly restricted his activity and, though an operation some years ago gave relief, Leyland has found travelling to coaching sessions in all parts of Yorkshire increasingly difficult. It is hard to imagine that Maurice did not have a part in the wording of this report yet his nephew Geoff said he finds it hard to believe his uncle would be party to a deliberate deception. Perhaps the realisation that he was in one battle he just could not win had given even his phlegmatic character a jolt. One thing is certain, he would have hated people fussing around him with long faces and buckets of sympathy and maybe this was his way of just getting on with life with the minimum of fuss. * Although he grew up with a large extended family Maurice had gradually seen his aunts and uncles pass away; his sister Cora was only 49 when she died in 1957, and he had largely lost touch with his cousins. He had always been well thought of by Connie’s family and, with his parents and sister moving down to Birmingham in 1927, he moved in with the Russells and soon become part of their everyday life. His ‘adopted’ cricket family at Headingley, also went their own way. The younger Yorkshire players got on with building their careers and the older ones got on with their own family lives. Maurice’s world began to close in on him and everything soon