Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

118 The Sixties overs, and generally; everyday 21 st century cricket, in other words. The MCC appointed a committee of six under Arthur Gilligan – the 72-year-old president-elect of MCC – that ‘severely censured’ Close for unfair ‘delaying tactics’, of the sort that saved or won England many Test matches before and since. In a book the year after, Close recalled how he went outside after the verdict – the southern cricket establishment having relished the chance to take Close, and Yorkshire, down a peg. Sellers, one of the six on the committee, followed him. ‘I told him I was ready to quit. Mr Sellers fixed me with that baleful glare which pre-war Yorkshire cricketers tell me reduced strong men to putty in his hands.’ Sellers told Close: ‘This isn’t the end. You have a job of work to do,’ namely captaining England against Pakistan the next day, in the final Test of the summer, that England won. ‘Get over there [The Oval] and do it and get stuck in.’ (Sellers did like that phrase.) Close was grateful: ‘Mr Sellers’ sensible words acted as shock treatment.’ Sellers was even more outnumbered as one of the MCC committee of 18 that decided not to pick Close on tour that winter, thus ending his time as England captain. Sellers was outnumbered not only as a backer of Close, but as a cricket man who could appreciate that Close acted at Birmingham for a reason; which the likes of former Conservative prime minister Sir Alec Douglas Home in the chair, and Lieutenant-General Sir Oliver Leese, the 72-year-old former corps commander under Montgomery, would not. Sellers was there because he served three three-year terms at the MCC, retiring eventually in September 1971. Sellers was still relevant; certainly by comparison with the MCC. As time passed, Sellers’ playing days were becoming legend. Alan Gibson in the Times in May 1967 harked back to how Sellers on a drying, uncovered wicket would put Verity on at once and six fielders around the bat, according to the old Wilfred Rhodes motto: ‘If batsman thinks it’s spinnin’, it’s spinnin’.’ Again, in August 1967 Gibson used Sellers as a stick to beat the present Yorkshire team with, for not scoring fast enough to take the chance to bowl on a wet pitch. Why so critical? Yorkshire were county champions in 1967; and 1968. However, as times changed, the social geography that made Yorkshire one of the strongest cricketing counties was changing, for the worse. In The Cricketer in July 1968, Bill Bowes warned ‘the vital basis of Yorkshire cricket is vanishing’. He saw two dangers. First: time limit or limited-overs cricket inside the county was making spin bowlers, ‘a traditional strength in Yorkshire cricket’, less useful; hence fewer were developing. Second: to be a Yorkshire cricketer was ‘no longer the aim of every youngster in the county’; what the club paid was not much more than any other employer. Few showed ‘a Boycott-like concentration’. Bowes, a major name in Yorkshire cricket and a journalist, could only sound the alarm. It was asking a lot of any one man, in cricket or any field of life, to resist or alter trends in society – that is to say, what came naturally to many people. Yet if anyone could do something, Sellers could – and in any case, he was the one the club would look to.