The Summer Field

122 the ‘keep your mouths closed’ part of Sellers’ philosophy. While a player, among men more senior than him, Sellers worked with the Yorkshire team’s long-flourishing democracy of knowledge. Maurice Leyland wrote in a June 1925 article how much he and other young players such as Sutcliffe, Percy Holmes and George Macaulay owed to the ‘tuition and encouragement’ of older players such as George Hirst and Wilfred Rhodes. By 1932, Leyland and the three he named were older players, that Sellers sensibly drew on. That said, someone had to take decisions; who bowled when, who fielded where. The long-time reporter and Wisden bastion Sydney Southerton praised Jardine after the 1932/33 tour for using his fast bowlers ‘with persistence but sparingly,’ and for his field placings (‘judicious moves to cope with the idiosyncrasies of the various Australian batsmen’). Southerton’s summing up of the tour was remarkable to modern eyes, not only for never using the word ‘bodyline’ but for lacking any sense that Jardine did anything wrong. You could see conspiracy in this (Southerton’s obituary in Wisden in 1936 called him ‘an ardent Freemason’). More likely, Wisden was not the great defender of right that it later liked to think it was. Southerton saw Jardine’s achievement for what it was: careful planning, well founded on opposition weakness, and carried out ruthlessly, regardless of what Southerton called ‘a storm of criticism and barracking’, Australian complaints that Southerton plainly had no time for. Alf Gover, the Surrey fast bowler who played under Jardine, in a 1936 article went through the intangible yet evidently important parts of captaincy. Perhaps revealing that Surrey lacked the institutionalised communal learning of Yorkshire, Gover wrote that ‘a good captain puts a spirit into a cricket side that is missing in the ordinary way’. The captain kept fielders and bowlers ‘keyed up’ and inspired confidence so that every player gave ‘his last ounce’. The Corinthian and England footballer and gifted amateur cricketer Gilbert Smith, in a 1908 article compared the two sports. Football was ‘totally different from cricket as regards leadership’: ‘In the winter game the captain cannot direct operations. He can but inspire effort and exercise a beneficial influence on the side,’ by his example and personality. Some of the ‘rules’ that Smith set for a captain were common to the Corinthian philosophy for either game: playing fairly (‘nothing underhand’), according to the laws and ‘wider interests’ than winning, such as the reputation of the game and its ‘sporting character’. What Smith called ‘good taste’ in football or cricket was hard to define, or to remember in the thick of a match; or you ignored it in the urge to win. The good of the game mattered, however, to people in authority who never had to get their hands dirty, or to be more exact, no longer or never had to feel the sting of a ball in their hands or on their cheek. Good character was a regular stick to beat captains with, if they offended polite society too blatantly. To name three England captains: by the time the Australians toured in 1934, Jardine was an outcast; Brian Close was sacked in 1967 for alleged time-wasting in a county match; and Michael Atherton nearly fell in 1994 over dust in his trouser pocket. Such controversies, no matter how odd or phoney in hindsight – or even at the time – do show that a captain, Captaincy and Command