Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

8 Oxford, May 1932 style. If he lasted, it would only be because he impressed his men – who paradoxically were of a better ‘class’ than him (as Sellers had been quick to admit). And yet because they were professionals, paid players, who belonged to a lower social class, their county would not trust any of them to be captain. Sellers had to do more than win cricket matches; he had to win over men. Sellers had seen the trap. If he had allowed the most senior players to control who bowled when, he would never have retrieved the lost power. Other followers of English cricket understood the amateur captain’s plight, because every county was the same. Sellers’ first opposing captain, Alan Melville went on to Sussex. When he told the club at the end of the 1934 season he could no longer captain them, the Sussex Daily News commented: The qualities of a good captain are many. He must be more than a good cricketer. He must have that genius of the heart which wins the friendship of the players. And yet it must be tempered with that sense of discipline which exacts the highest effort. A good captain had to be chummy – and not. The Ashbourne journalist ‘Plaindealer’ writing in 1930 in praise of Derbyshire’s 1920s captain G.R.Jackson, recalled how through binoculars he once saw a fielder talk to Jackson in a way that Plaindealer took as an ‘act of insubordination’. The player might have thought himself indispensable; ‘he found he was wrong’. According to Plaindealer , Guy Jackson ‘approached the ideal of a county skipper’: The post has always demanded determination, tact, personality, good judgement and equable temperament and the power of exercising discipline from its occupant. These have been essential apart from a captain’s abilities as a cricketer, and it has always been desirable that the office holder should be able to play ‘a captain’s innings’ on occasion and a column might easily be filled before the subject of what was required of a skipper was exhausted. Significantly, Plaindealer went on to what Jackson was not: There have been since the war more county captains than one who have not been captains save in name. They have done what their committees have wished or their senior professionals have told them to do. The true story of how one famous pro’ came to the front of the players’ balcony at Lord’s, of all places in the world, and clapped his hands to signify to his captain who was batting in the middle that it was time that the innings was declared, is typical of these well-meaning captains who have possibly accepted office from a sense of duty and done their best. As that suggested, having a good nature – in Sellers’ case, if he had welcomed Macaulay for making his life easier - made you a weak captain. While we have no way of knowing, that story of Plaindealer ’s may have been of Yorkshire; Wilfred Rhodes notoriously told his 1920s captains what to do. Like Caesar, the wise county captain never dropped his guard in case of assassins. To captain the likes of Wilfred Rhodes, you had to