Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

122 When I’m 64: Illingworth and Close Sellers. His word seems to be law. Many times he has stated that the club is bigger than the player. I agree with him entirely. I also think, with respect, that the club is bigger than Brian Sellers, which he seems, sometimes to forget. This neat criticism, picked out in the summer of 1969 in Fleet Street newspapers, of Sellers as over-mighty wounded more than Wardle’s ever did, because this came from authority: the new captain of Leicestershire, and England. Yorkshire in 1969 came 13 th in the Championship, arguably because Close lacked Illingworth as his deputy. As in all sports, and indeed beyond, Yorkshire was finding that there was more to renewing a team than shedding old players for new. On Tuesday evening, 24 November 1970 – after Yorkshire had come a creditable fourth in that year’s Championship – the club secretary John Nash asked Brian Close to a meeting the next day. ‘As I drove the ten miles or so from my home to Headingley I had no idea what the meeting was going to be about,’ he said eight years later in his autobiography, the significantly-titled I Don’t Bruise Easily . ‘So it was just a bit of a surprise to find no committee in session, just Mr Nash and Brian Sellers, Mr Yorkshire Cricket.’ Sellers said: ‘Well, Brian, you have had a good innings.’ ‘The committee had decided my services were no longer required and that I had to make a decision whether to resign or be sacked.’ Close was like the man whose wife tells him she’s leaving after 22 years. ‘My senses told me that the greatest most overwhelming disaster of my life was taking place yet my mind simply could not grasp the enormity of it all’: I heard myself saying how long have I got to decide because I would like a word with my wife. You have got ten minutes, replied Mr Sellers. The two prepared statements were read over to me and I decided that resignation was the lesser of the two evils. I drove away with my mind in a whirl. I wanted to cry. As I drove along Kirkstall Road my vision misted up so much I had to stop. And then I was sick there at the side of the road. It was, as Close said, ‘the worst day of my life’. Yorkshire had cast him off as suddenly as Wardle, a dozen years before. Close was even more senior than Wardle had been; in his seven years as captain, Yorkshire had been champions four times. Sellers had given it to Close straight; the outcome would not be as straightforward. The outcomes to this sacking – for the player, and the club - were different from Wardle’s, for several reasons. First, Close did not makeWardle’smistake of giving one exclusive interview. It helped Close’s cause that he did not pick a fight – not that the man, first shattered, then mystified, could even think in such deliberate ways. On the regional television news on 2 February 1971 – after the club’s annual general meeting – Close denied any vendetta between him and Sellers: ‘I have always admired and respected him and I have stuck up for him with the other players.’ Yorkshire lacked any logical case; if they blamed Close for shortcomings, why had they kept him – ‘a great player’, as they admitted?! What reasons Yorkshire did offer, or had twisted by Fleet Street