Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

102 Chapter Ten The Wardle Affair Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions: they want to be led, and they wish to remain free. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America The facts of the Wardle affair are that on Wednesday 30 July 1958, the first day of Yorkshire’s match at Bramall Lane, after a meeting of the cricket committee, the county told Wardle and then the world that the club would ‘not be calling on his services after the end of the season’. Wardle took eight wickets in the match as Yorkshire beat Somerset by an innings. Wardle bowled most overs for Yorkshire in the match; and indeed that season; and the three seasons before that. In fact Wardle had bowled the most, or second most, overs for the county each season since 1947. Wardle asked to, and was allowed to, stand down from Yorkshire’s next match, at Old Trafford, starting Saturday 2 August. On the Monday, the Daily Mail ran the first of three articles in three days in Wardle’s name, telling his side of the story and what he thought of the club. The MCC dropped him from their touring party to Australia and he never played first-class cricket in England again. He was 35. Just as you can follow a river from the sea to the dales and the moors to its source, so in a tragic or complicated or simply a human story like Wardle’s you can go back years. To the beginning of his time with Yorkshire, if you like. The impressionable young man who wanted to do well began learning how to play for Yorkshire under Sellers. Did Sellers do a thorough enough job of planting the club culture in him? And even if he did, did Wardle understand that the discipline was for his own good, and the good of all, and not simply because Sellers was like a sergeant major, someone you had to obey because of his rank? And even then, did Wardle apply the discipline to himself – always the surest sort of discipline - and did the captains after Sellers keep the discipline? Once Wardle’s three articles forced these questions into the open, plenty of people said not; even the captain that Wardle played under longest. Norman Yardley wrote that he never found Wardle easy to handle, ‘but we never had major difficulties’. That did beg the question, what difficulties did they have? Many meanwhile said Yardley had been too easy-going. Even Yardley: ‘I hate waving the big stick of discipline and somehow I can’t get it into my head that it should be necessary in a game of cricket.’ After Yardley retired in 1955, Billy Sutcliffe, Herbert’s son, was captain for two unsuccessful years; then Ron Burnet, the second team captain, in