Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

114 The Sixties seem odd as Yorkshire players, including Sellers, had learned in one- day leagues; although as county players who often aspired to play for England, they may have felt that three-day matches set them apart from league cricketers. A longer cricket match (or book) is not necessarily better quality. Sellers, in old age like many, metaphorically shook his head at how unadventurous cricket took hold in the one-day game: Containment today, not experiment. They have a theory that a spinner can’t spin a new ball. Rubbish. Rhodes would’ve given ‘em three sixes to get their wickets. Eighteen runs a wicket – that’s not bad. In Sunday League games, where overall scoring rates might only be four runs an over, 18 runs might have been bad. However, with such suggestions, Sellers was decades ahead of his time: Why not experiment today in one-day cricket. No-one chases early on – the openers don’t. No-one straight drives past or over the bowler’s head. It amazes me, because nowadays you don’t need to put a man out there. Why, when we faced Wally Hammond we always pulled in mid-on, mid-off closer to the bowler (the only people in danger were the umpire and the bowler). Wally’s great strokes were past the bowler and we had to counter them … He used it because it is the shortest way to the boundary – the fastest way. Why don’t players use it today. There’s nothing new under the sun. Sellers’ ideas are now the norm in one-day cricket – so-called pinch hitters, slow bowlers taking the pace off the ball, extreme attention to detail in the field – and were only waiting to be applied; it took captains with the knowledge and the self-confidence to defy convention. This does beg the main problem for any eminent sportsman who goes into club management or player coaching; how does he make a success of new tasks; drawing on his reputation, without boring younger men with his ‘in my day’ stories, or sticking to outdated ways of thinking? In a 1961 book, Fast Fury , Fred Trueman spoke of how a match at Bradford (that is, nearest Sellers’ home in Bingley) never went by without Sellers ‘breezing in’: ‘If we are not doing very well he never hesitates to remind us (very forcibly) of the fact and say what we ought to try and do to put things right.’ As Trueman was still a player at the time, he had to tell stories with care. One story however gave an insight into Sellers; when Brian Close crashed his car, damaged his knee (that ‘gave him a lot of trouble later on’) and had to step down from the team. Trueman told how Sellers ‘burst into the room’ (he never seemed to enter a room in any other way) ‘and exclaimed, nah then, weers Stirling Moss? There were many smiles and Brian Close looked rather sheepish.’ As so often, more than one reading of this story is possible. Was Sellers simply lacking in human sympathy? Yet other players had smiled at the comparison of Close (notoriously bad behind the wheel) with a racing driver. Was Sellers showing (by his standards) compassion? as he could have bawled out the senior player for his avoidable injury. Sellers had made a joke of it. ‘He was a man among men,’ Sidney Fielden recalled in 2016. The story becomes more ominous