Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

112 without a vote – to preserve the myth that everyone at Lord’s agreed on everything, true to the idea that disunity was a sign of weakness that critics could exploit. Through such dry acts of a committee, and far from willingly, came the crucial first reform of first-class cricket, that became the Gillette Cup, and that led to a Sunday league, international one-dayers, T20 and cricket as the 21 st century knows it. It was a truly British act of evolution, like the 1832 Reform Act. Those in authority gave way: too much, complained some; not enough, complained others. Sellers was one of those at the centre of authority; he had become a committee member of the MCC in May 1960, for three years. Some of the 16 other members had been county captains in his playing days: E.R.T.Holmes and Robbins. Why was Sellers one of the trusted few, given that he had ‘blotted his copybook’ in Australia in 1946, and was notoriously ‘forthright’? There was more than one side to Sellers. The side the public saw was ‘the blunt, hail-fellow-well-met Yorkshireman with a habit of addressing folk as ‘me old cock sparrer’’ as the long-time journalist E.M.Wellings put it. Sellers could fit into various company; or, to be less charitable, he could put on faces, and voices (broad Yorkshire, or posher). As Wellings noted: ‘If he sometimes gave the impression of being a bull in a china shop, he could when necessary act with tact and diplomacy.’ Surviving letters of his to Lord’s prove this. In July 1957, Sellers wrote to Ronnie Aird: ‘Dear Ronny, I shall be delighted to serve on the sub-committee – anything to help any time will be a pleasure. Hope all is well with you. Best wishes from Brian.’ Those few words show Sellers entirely at ease with Lord’s and on first-name terms; Doug Insole and Alec Hastilow, to name two others who sent acceptance letters, signed with their full names. And on 30 December 1959, sending Yorkshire’s views on amateur status ahead of a meeting, Sellers wrote in the same ‘Dear Ronny’ vein: ‘Yorkshire have no further comments to make to this meeting. Sorry to be so late. Best wishes, yours ever Brian.’ In return Lord’s was as cheery as it could be: ‘My dear Brian, I will see that his Grace [the Duke of Norfolk] is informed of the possibility of your late arrival.’ Contrast Sellers’ good relations with Lord’s with a man who outwardly had much in common with him, Wilfred Wooller, of Glamorgan. In April 1961 for example Wooller began a letter to Aird: ‘I have always thought the amateur status standing committee a stupid idea but I am now quite certain it is stark raving mad.’ Aird replied that Wooller had written ‘a great many pretty offensive letters to me in the past’. Faced by someone in authority who can bully some – usually those below him in rank – and be nice to others, we might resent them as hypocrites. While such men might be calculating in their dealings with others, which again we might resent as falseness, Sellers was a man with more than one setting on his control panel. After Yorkshire won the Championship in 1962 (under Vic Wilson) and 1963 (in Brian Close’s first season as captain) Yorkshire came only fifth in 1964 and by August 1965 were out of the running again. In his 1987 autobiography, Boycott told what happened next. Sellers ‘thrust his head round the dressing-room door at Headingley and told everyone he would see them individually next morning’: The Sixties