Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

121 about 16 or 18 players with one-day games. Cricket has changed and we can’t change it, we can’t criticise it. While cricketers like any workers looking for the best deal were to Sellers ‘underhand’, he could view Illingworth with sympathy, and as part of a wider movement. At the time, however, Illingworth had to become one more unwanted player having to leave. Or rather, the player had simply not agreed to the employer’s deal; most did. In a talk to the Northern Cricket Society in October 1960, Sellers significantly linked the club’s conditions of employment, and other counties’ recruitment. Other counties had approached several young players, and approached capped players from time to time, but the players knew which side their bread was buttered, he said: ‘No other county consistently gave benefits as good as Yorkshire’s.’ In other words, if a player stayed with Yorkshire, and behaved, a benefit season would give him more money in the end than another county could. Indeed, Illingworth had accepted that deal; he took a benefit in 1965 of £6500, a six-figure sum by 21 st century standards. Players, then, had more choice than they let on, and Yorkshire did have its investment to protect (although as always in sport, the local clubs truly brought on talented youth, that the paying club took credit for). As Sellers told the October 1957 annual dinner of the Bradford League, Yorkshire was not blind to other counties offering a young player a three- or five-year contract. Yorkshire, he said, would not stand in the way of a player that wanted to leave. If we were to put it less charitably, the club did not want to raise its bid in the market for labour. Yorkshire felt the other county ought to ask for permission. ‘There is going to be a dust-up about this,’ Sellers said. ‘It will be done very quietly but it will be done.’ Again, as with MCC, we see the mania in cricket for the pretence of a happy family, and raising conflicts privately. Yorkshire took offence at ‘poaching’ because it would never poach; it only wanted men born in the county. Once it dropped that custom, it would become like any other county. Sellers was modern enough to understand that players wanted more money and longer contracts; and old-fashioned enough to resist. Sellers resisted any change that might take power from the committee and give it to the captain, or the other players. In his 2014 book The Corridor of Certainty , Boycott described selection committee meetings during a home Championship match: ‘Sellers would call Closey off the field and summon him into the meeting.’ Brian Close did not know his next team, because ‘the committee would just ask Brian his opinion and then dismiss him while they made the decisions’. Besides the actual power resting with the committee, and its chairman, we should note - as Boycott took care to show – the way Sellers used that power, to ‘summon’ and ‘dismiss’ whoever was captain. As Sellers later admitted, cricket was changing. Unlike Wardle, Illingworth had stuck up for himself, and bettered himself outside Yorkshire. In his 1969 book, Spinner’s Wicket , he warned that Yorkshire were out of step and risked a ‘player-drain’: I still believe there were quite a few of the committee who would have liked me to stay on as a player, but I doubt whether they could have convinced Mr When I’m 64: Illingworth and Close