Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

108 The Wardle Affair At least Wooller gave contracts to players. Yorkshire gave players ‘gentlemen’s agreements’ from summer to summer, allowing the club to give a month’s notice to anyone; as they did to Wardle. Herbert Sutcliffe, in reply to Wardle in the Daily Mirror , said that Wardle had broken his contract by going into print without vetting by the county secretary. Ray Illingworth parted with the club in 1968 because he wanted more than a ‘gentleman’s agreement’. Here was another example of the club keeping things vague, so it could do as it pleased. Illingworth’s move – to leave Yorkshire and, as importantly, captain Leicestershire to success – was a sign of the changing times. In 1958, the Wardle affair not only rid Yorkshire of a trouble-maker; it sent a message to the other players: step out of line, and be cast out; not only from Yorkshire, but any prospect of playing for England, or another county, even. Whether Yorkshire recovered their team spirit without Wardle, or did better in the 1960s merely because Surrey declined, did not matter, even if you could measure such intangibles. Yorkshire rid itself of what Sutcliffe in the Mirror called its ‘soft underbelly’ of the past few seasons, in contrast to the ‘old die hard spirit and urge to win that was the hallmark of our play throughout the 1930s’. With Sellers as chairman, Yorkshire entered the 1960s with the 1930s in charge. Was that the new leadership Wardle had wished for in the Daily Mail ? He had said in his third and final article: There is so much wrong to be right that it is a wonder that the committee have got away with it for so long. There must be an outcry from the good folk who make up the county’s 12,000 members. They have been extremely patient in these dark years. But the pot is simmering. Sooner or later it is going to boil over. I urge them to be en masse at the annual meeting of the club. That is the only way they will ever find out what is going on. Eventually, and in Sellers’ time, they would.