Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

119 Chapter Twelve When I’m 64: Illingworth and Close Nobody, but nobody, my friend, had any foreboding that the end was drawing near. Or rather, one did sense something, something haunting, but so vague, so indistinct, that it was not like a presentiment of the extraordinary. Ryszard Kapuscinski, The Emperor A clue to where the Yorkshire committee stood politically came, as for so many in sport in that era, over southern Africa. The club was ready in autumn 1967 to take up an invitation to tour Rhodesia – then a white- rule break-away state. ‘All we are trying to do is play cricket,’ said Sellers. Such was the cry, then and later – at the Moscow Olympics in 1980, and on tours of South Africa in the 1980s until apartheid fell - of the supposedly unpolitical sportsman. The Labour Government objected that Yorkshire would aid the whites-only regime, if it took the hospitality. On 15 September, Sellers’ cricket committee voted to pass the matter to the larger general committee, ‘in view of the many issues involved’ as the committee minutes put it. Three days later came the unanimous vote – again, that MCC-like mania to show unity to the outside world – not to go to Rhodesia. As a sign of what the committee men really thought, Herbert Sutcliffe’s dog wore a label on its collar saying ‘Yorkshire for Rhodesia’ (a political-sounding slogan!?). When reporters asked Sellers about the political pressure, he replied simply: ‘Ask Whitehall.’ He added: ‘It’s a great pity that you can’t just go and have a game. Anywhere else would have done.’ Just as ‘if batsman thinks it’s spinnin’, it’s spinnin’’, once anyone insisted that you were doing something political, you were political. Other invited English sports clubs had said no to Rhodesia. Sellers was correct; Yorkshire could have picked ‘anywhere’ from a dozen countries, and over the years the club had: Jamaica in 1935, North America in 1964. At best, Sellers and his committee had been naïve; at worst, they had made themselves look like bigots. Yorkshire were closing the 1960s much as they closed the 1930s; their successful side near full of England players was if anything too outstanding for its own good. Several ageing men were about to finish at once. By August 1968, Ray Illingworth, having turned 36, and facing competition as an off-spinner from the young Geoff Cope, wanted a three-year contract. Yorkshire, as ever, would not compromise with a player. Illingworth sent a letter of resignation, which made hardly a ripple in the press. In an autobiography the year after, Illingworth described how, an hour after he handed in his letter on the Monday morning, Bill Bowes was asking him