Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

115 given Bryan Stott’s opinion that Brian Sellers didn’t have any trust in Brian Close, as a cricketer; ‘he was always expecting that Brian [Close] would do something silly’. Sellers did good for the club; for instance in July 1960 he got Trueman released from the Gentlemen-Players match at Lord’s, while Lancashire, the other leading team in the Championship, did not ask for their leading fast bowler, Brian Statham. Sellers told reporters: ‘I don’t much care what the Lancashire people think about it.’ Yorkshire were doing well; they won the Championship in 1960; came second to Hampshire in 1961; and won again in 1962; and 1963. How did they do it? Crawford White of the Daily Express asked Sellers in September 1962. ‘I can soon tell thee t’answer,’ Sellers replied. Having neatly hinted to readers that Sellers was talking in broad Yorkshire, White then returned to proper English. We spend a lot of time and brass finding our players. We are a vast county. There are over 500 clubs. Another advantage is that our youngsters are born to competitive league cricket. And their burning ambition is to play for Yorkshire. These advantages of social geography had applied for generations. ‘If our team were wiped out I would guarantee another Yorkshire side on top in five years,’ Sellers added, somewhat crassly, as an air crash had indeed wiped out the Manchester United football team in 1958. It all went to show that Yorkshire had everything going for it; the supply of talent was such that ‘we have another full team at least of Yorkshire exiles with other county sides’. And there lay the trouble; the way he kept saying ‘we’. As if he were Yorkshire cricket. If Sellers was in error, it was an error that he had grown into, as shown from a story from this time, from Sidney Fielden. Around this time, the future Yorkshire committee man was a young police detective under his sergeant Leonard Bell (‘Sellers thought the world of him, called him Ding Dong’) at Shipley. The two policemen, and the vicar of Baildon, Horace Pike, would play snooker at the soldiers’ and sailors’ club at nearby Baildon (‘a gentlemen’s club, ladies not allowed, only once a year’). At about midnight, ‘Sellers would burst through the double doors, and shout, ‘which of you [fornicating buggers] is going to play me at snooker?!’ That’s the type of man he was. Quite funny, is that, the way he used to do that. Everybody used to laugh.” On his earlier beat of Conisborough, near Doncaster, Fielden had become friends with Ellis Robinson, who lived there, and had heard stories about Sellers. Now Fielden was getting to know the man himself, playing doubles at snooker until 2 am or 3 am. As Sellers bustled around the table (‘physically very big and strong … his language was very choice’), using his cue as a stick, because of a stiff hip, Fielden could ask Sellers for stories about Hutton and Verity. As Fielden recalled: ‘It was good, wasn’t it.’ Sellers was, as Fielden said, ‘a very impressive man, of course’. Others wanted to be impressed. Sellers, with that habit of theatrical entrances, evidently liked imposing himself. His daughter-in-law Anne agreed about The Sixties