Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

105 enough: Burnet was 39, the captain of the second team and a newcomer to the firsts (much like Sellers had been); but, he might be worth his weight in gold if he pulled the team together. A few weeks later Burnet showed Wardle a newspaper cutting about the speech: ‘Burnet told me that Brian Sellers, Yorkshire’s former captain had passed it on to him.’ Wardle saw Burnet was ‘displeased’, as any cricketer called a ‘passenger’ in print would be. More subtly, Wardle evidently felt at liberty to hold and (worse) give opinions. To the club, this was dangerous and presumptuous; and it had bothered Sellers enough for him to keep the offending article and let Burnet know about it. Sellers used to speak far more rudely, without fee, to cricketing and other audiences. John Stanley, as secretary of the Leeds Chartered Accountants Students Society at this time, invited him to speak at their annual dinner, ‘and I recall his reference to Nasser as ‘that pillock in Egypt’ was received with much cheering’. Wardle, from some of his arguments, might have sounded like an ally of Sellers; because far from being undisciplined, Wardle presented himself as the voice of discipline, unheeded, for instance when he called for a player curfew (and cursing when late to bed players dropped catches the next day). When Yorkshire were plainly faltering on the field in 1957, Swanton among others printed the then novel idea that Yorkshire should make Sellers team manager. Sellers, whether off his own bat or by permission of the committee, was already doing some geeing-up from a distance. ‘Get stuck in,’ said his telegram in July 1957 to The Oval, where Yorkshire collapsed to an innings defeat against champions Surrey. Wardle’s most vivid and hurtful point – hurtful whether it was true or not – struck at those in power at the club: ‘A rot has set in with Yorkshire and its committee and it is eating away at the greatest county club in the world.’ ‘Rot’ off the field spread onto the field. Wardle sought reform; or put another way, a return to the Sellers days. Sellers however was one of the regime that had chosen the unsuccessful captains; and, in his third article, Wardle raised how Yorkshire had not chosen Hutton, captain of England, as their captain. Much later - well after Yorkshire sacked him , the season after Wardle – Burnet spoke of whether Hutton wanted to be Yorkshire captain, after Yardley retired. Some said not. Burnet said Hutton did, ‘certain of it. Norman Yardley and Brian Sellers said – well, he isn’t considering the side at all, he is just collecting hundreds.’ In passing, here is one more piece of evidence that Sellers had a say in the important personnel decisions – and what Sellers decided, happened. To Wardle, not making Hutton captain was the ‘biggest blunder’. Sellers could not tolerate such criticism, let alone sympathise. Other critics, outside Yorkshire, were saying much the same; Wardle was simply more informed. Nottinghamshire’s Australian spinner Bruce Dooland in a column in July 1957 asked why the ‘great White Rose’ was so ‘wilted’. Yorkshire finished third that season, to Surrey, champions for the sixth time; a feat rivalled only by Yorkshire in Sellers’ time, as many noted. In August 1956, Dooland answered his own question; what was the secret of Surrey under captain Stuart Surridge: ‘Surridge has something of The Wardle Affair