The Summer Field

114 belong to a sales team, how would you like newspapers speculating about whether you could be next to lose your job, or even that someone else is in line for promotion? And if you are not picked, would you enjoy hiding your disappointment when newspapers asked how you felt, knowing that others will read it? Selection is part of life, and understanding it can genuinely help us. Why did the best-looking girl at the school dance choose your best mate and not you? Selectors have a necessary job and to do it well, or even at all, they will hurt others. Selectors will end great careers, cut short others, and never allow some to begin. And until we can gather so much data about human affairs that we can run computer programmes and say with precise statistics how other choices might have played out, a selector can never prove their decision was for the best. Yes, selectors could answer back that critics cannot prove their alternatives would have been any better; that, however, would imply that selectors and critics were on a par. They are not, because selectors alone have responsibility, whether they hold it for the good of the team, or out of selfish ambition. Selectors, like generals sending men into danger, might not love their power, but they must be cold. Any decision that suits one man condemns another. In a business, the selector of staff can always buy off the disappointed with a new title, or money. A cricket team only has eleven places. A healthy club will expect more recruits than it needs: ‘… the selectors’ difficulties are usually in elimination rather than discovery,’ J.M. Kilburn wrote in 1950 in his History of Yorkshire County Cricket 1924-1949 . As close and true a look inside selection as we are likely to find is in the old hand-written committee minutes of the Leicestershire county club. As in all official reports, to spare feelings and to make the group look wise and united, the disagreements were ironed out, the unspoken left unwritten. At least we can eavesdrop inside the club pavilion or the secretary’s office in Leicester, and know what the players and the press did not. The selectors are too dead to mind. * First, who were the selectors? At Leicestershire, in March 1924 for example, the general committee appointed six: fewer than the seven on the finance, and eleven on the ground committees. Presumably, many more selectors would never agree. Two of the six were the first and second team captains. Three of the other four were past captains. They were not the same men who decided on player agreements or who, in July 1927, invited Edward Dawson, the elected captain of Cambridge University, to be county captain. Money and selection did overlap. Finance committee men decided how much money would go on talent money; after the 1921 season for example, £200; in 1935, as little as £75. The finance committee split the money according to marks given by the captain. While no doubt only a fraction of what was ever said at selection meetings – let alone before and after – ever went into the minutes, it is striking how seldom policy entered the record. An exception was the first meeting of the 1929 season: ‘The importance of developing a LH [left hand] bowler Selection and Recruitment