Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

103 1958. If, presumably, the causes of Wardle’s sacking lay partly with the player, partly the club, who was responsible, of all those at the club in Wardle’s years? Just as in a fraud you follow the money and in a murder mystery you do well to find who was nearest the victim, a good question to ask is: who decided to sack Wardle, ‘the surprise of the first order’, according to Jim Swanton in the Daily Telegraph on 31 July. Swanton quoted Sellers: ‘There was no indication of this happening on Sunday [27 July] when I helped to pick the England party for Australia. It was a lightning decision. I knew nothing about it before this afternoon. He will be good enough for England but not Yorkshire.’ While we cannot read too much into the fact that Sellers said nothing against Wardle – Swanton may not have asked – it’s striking how uninformed Sellers claimed to be about his own club. Sellers had indeed been one of three – Freddie Brown and Doug Insole were the others – who chose the 17 for Australia, with the five regular selectors: Les Ames, Tom Dollery, Wilf Wooller and England captain Peter May, chaired by Gubby Allen. If Sellers did know the sacking was coming, his county committee would know he was lying. In January Sellers had been named the next Yorkshire chairman, to take over from Clifford Hesketh in January 1959. Was Hesketh (described witheringly by the Daily Mail as a ‘61-year-old retired colliery official from Barnsley’) the type to take such a decision (‘the biggest cricket sensation for years’, the Daily Mail called it) without checking with Sellers? If Sellers had known of the firing, the weekend before Yorkshire did it, but did not warn the MCC selectors, before they hired Wardle for the winter, they could reasonably ask, why not? We can at least speculate that by pleading ignorance, and an implied lack of influence inside his own club, Sellers was telling the smallest lie he could. If Sellers knew what Yorkshire were about to do to Wardle; if, as in Australia in November 1947, he was caught between two masters, he chose Yorkshire. He would not trust the MCC with Yorkshire’s business; someone would tell others and the gossip would spread across the small world of English cricket, and into the press. Yorkshire would lose face, and control of their affairs. In his first article Wardle described how, ‘pent up and angry’ he sought answers from Hesketh at Bramall Lane. Hesketh hardly came across as strong-willed (‘the chairman took out a statement he had prepared and read out the club’s reasons for getting rid of me’). Wardle quoted to Mail readers Sellers’ comment about the ‘snap’ decision. In fact, Hesketh told him, the committee had considered Wardle weeks earlier when they had ‘compulsorily retired’ two less senior former England men, Frank Lowson and Bob Appleyard. While the cricket committee minutes have nothing to say about Wardle in 1958, until the sacking, minutes are only the face that a committee wants to show to the world. As early as July 1949, according to the selection committee minutes Yardley and Sellers warned the player Alec Coxon about his ‘conduct’; a year later the club sacked him for ‘misbehaviour’. As Sellers was willing to do such unpleasant work – and no doubt the other committee members were glad to let him - it’s hard to believe he knew as little about Wardle as he pretended to. The Wardle Affair