Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

123 When I’m 64: Illingworth and Close – such as, Lancashire were more successful at one-day cricket – still did not excuse the way Sellers did it. The Daily Mirror for instance deplored the sacking as a slur, by ‘a shire where cricketers should be seen and not heard’. What little case the club set out, it made a pig’s ear of presenting. The first general committee meeting after the sacking, on 18 December, decided against ‘a further statement’ and instead settled for a laughably useless ‘paragraph’ in the annual report, and the offer of an explanation at the AGM; which invited the uproar of 1117 attending on 30 January. By putting members first, worthily enough, the club came across to the wider public, in the media, as unfeeling. The comments of the two main figures in the Yorkshire Post after the AGM showed who was on sure ground. Close was already in talks with Somerset, whose captain he became for the next seven seasons: Mr Sellers said at the annual meeting that my behaviour off the field had on several occasions been far from what it should have been. I am no angel but I have done nothing of which I am ashamed. If they have had complaints on several occasions as they say, I am surprised they have not spoken to me before. I find it strange they should say something now but not when Yorkshire were winning the County Championship or Gillette Cup under my captaincy. They have tried to brand me in public. I want the public to be the jury and if Mr Sellers would meet me say on a TV programme I will be happy to let the public decide. There are several things I could have said over the years but I refrained from doing so because of my love for cricket and Yorkshire in particular. But they started this and I am not going to have the public think I am a rogue. Sellers, brief and lame by comparison, said the club would hold a special committee meeting: ‘I don’t know when the meeting will be but we are not going to keep people waiting.’ And asked if he would be considering his position, he replied: ‘Obviously I will, so will the rest of the committee.’ The press now had a story to follow; the members had revolted, as Wardle had wished for in 1958. At the 1970 AGM, only 111 voted about the South African tour in the apartheid era – a great left-wing cause of the age. Now a majority, 570 to 507, voted against the club report and balance sheet. For hours they debated not only Close (and the choice of Boycott as captain in his place) but the playing strength; why more committee men were from Sheffield than Leeds; even the catering. The leader of an ‘action group’, Jack Mewies, called the ten minutes given to Close ‘disgraceful’. Mewies brought up a letter that Sellers sent to the president of Lancashire, Lionel Lister, after a Sunday match at Manchester in August 1970, when Close had made ‘remarks’ to Lister. ‘Sellers condemned Close without taking his opinion of the incident. This is kangaroo justice,’ said Mewies, a solicitor from Skipton. Richard Ulyatt, writing in the Yorkshire Post , felt that in the uproar the committee let the speakers have their say; giving the day to the ‘action group’ protesters. Sellers did not quite bite his tongue. On the Lister case, which had sounded like two men saying things in the heat of a game best forgotten, Sellers said: ‘Knowing Mr Lister I was perfectly certain that