Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

126 When I’m 64: Illingworth and Close assuming he was speaking for everybody, and that his unelected ‘group’ (of how many?!) was on a par with the century-old club. The committee however was so unused to dissent, let alone through the media, that it was leaving the field to Mewies. A fortnight later, the club said that Sellers would retire at the end of the year. This delighted Mewies (‘the one really major outstanding point we wanted agreed to’). He wondered aloud why Sellers had not said so sooner. From the outside, it looked as if Sellers had been holding on to power. The club minutes show how the uproar had undone him months before. At that 24 November general committee meeting, the last one in peacetime, Herbert Sutcliffe gave notice that he would propose Worsley, Sellers and Arthur Mitchell as honorary life members at the AGM. At the next month’s meeting, Sellers offered to withdraw his name, ‘but following the committee’s unanimous insistence he agreed to let his name be put forward’. When Sutcliffe and Yardley publicly proposed and seconded Worsley and Mitchell, Sellers’ name had gone. At a meeting on 25 January, when Sellers ‘kindly agreed to defend those charges connected with cricket’, the general committee was glad to have him. After the AGM, he was not on any of the sub-committees to come up with new rules, or to look into player contracts, finance, or even catering (that his brother Godfrey was a member of). The honorary treasurer, Michael Crawford, not Sellers, met the ‘action group’. Sellers had become toxic. The county claimed that when Sellers, and B.H.Barber, chairman of the finance committee, were re-elected for 1971, they intended the year to be their last; and Sellers had been going to say so, at the usual pre-season lunch on 28 April. The committee had wanted Sellers to stay, rather than have a new captain, and new chairman, in the same year. Whatever the truth, Yorkshire would be short of experience on and off the field. John Nash was retiring as secretary, aged 65; and Doug Padgett was taking over as coach from the 68-year-old Arthur Mitchell, meaning one fewer old player to aid Boycott. In time for the new season, Sellers, now 64, had resolved Yorkshire’s wounds as best he could. ‘This has made the way clear for amity,’ crowed Mewies; not that the ‘action group’ was folding. He and his kind must have liked the sound of their own voices, and the sight of their words in print. The next time Yorkshire faltered, every sports journalist knew who to call. Until then, everyone could look forward to some cricket. Geoffrey Boycott was home; he had his left arm in a sling, broken while winning the Ashes in Australia under Ray Illingworth. What else could go wrong?! Some of those mid-March reports of Sellers’ retirement sounded like obituaries. In The Times , John Woodcock found it ‘hard to believe that he will no longer be heard’. As in obituaries, people offered more sympathy for Sellers, now that he was going. Eric Todd, having come out against Sellers, wrote: ‘It would be stupid not to appreciate that according to his own lights, his autocracy was nothing other than discipline which, heaven alone knows’ - Todd too was in his 60s – ‘is in shorter supply than ever in most walks of life.’ Never ones to feel sentimental, the journalists asked