Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

9 Oxford, May 1932 be as knowledgeable as them, or at least seek knowledge – and always keeping a balance between respecting the players for knowing more than you, and not letting them boss you about. To hope to excel, you had to devote yourself to such learning; unlike Surrey’s 1920s captain, Percy Fender, who according to the sports writer Herbert Henley could ‘detach himself completely from the game … and live an intellectually different life’. Henley gave the example of Fender sitting in the writing room of The Oval pavilion, dictating business letters to a clerk, at a critical stage of a match. When a wicket fell, Fender rose, and five minutes later ‘he was hitting fours off Macaulay and Rhodes’. Henley admired Fender for having more to his life than cricket; however, under Fender, Surrey did no better than come second – once to Yorkshire. In Sellers’ first years as captain, Sussex challenged Yorkshire most, coming second from 1932 to 1934. Each time it fell short, the county blamed injuries, tiring players, or not enough reserves – an ‘extraordinary run of troubles’ as the Sussex Daily News put it in its review of the 1935 season. It singled out Yorkshire and Lancashire (winners in 1934) as counties with ‘unrivalled resources …. lots of players on the staff, quite enough to fill a gap in the first eleven at any time’. Sussex did not run a second team. Yorkshire’s Second Eleven cost about £1000 a year, as much as three players’ wages, ‘money well spent’ as the club’s cricket committee chairman Arthur Sellers – Brian’s father – told the 1935 annual general meeting. While Sussex had a point – metropolitan counties that host Test matches have always had more to spend – were they making excuses? And did that explain why Yorkshire, and not Lancashire, under Sellers from 1932 won the Championship six summers in eight – a rare run in any sport? At the time, how Yorkshire kept doing it was the talk of English cricket; ‘the marvel of the Yorkshire spirit’, as Hampshire clubmen put it in the pavilion at Bournemouth when Yorkshire visited in July 1933. Sellers was not the sole reason; and yet such success in his time was no coincidence. His style of captaincy, the culture of the team, and the running of the Yorkshire opening batsman Percy Holmes. Hedley Verity. Surrey captain Percy Fender.