Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

129 When I’m 64: Illingworth and Close The sheer inhumanity of the sacking of Close gave Boycott’s captaincy a bad start, quite apart from a missing batsman. The sacking put pressure on whoever came next to do better (another reason Sellers did it?). When the county duly finished 13 th in the Championship and second from bottom in the Sunday League – and remember Close went because he allegedly did not take one-day cricket seriously enough – it looked as if Yorkshire had made a mistake. Regardless, at the October 1971 committee meeting when he stood down as chairman, Sellers proposed Boycott as captain for 1972 (‘carried unanimously’). Sellers had set out his demands at the pre-season lunch in April 1971: ‘Our batsmen have to get out there and score more runs and they have got to score them more quickly. Not only that they have got to keep their eyes on the scoreboard. Far too often last year we missed vital bonus points by not even looking at the board.’ These were strange words. If the batsmen had been so at fault, why had the captain gone? And if, as their 13 th place suggested and as Bill Bowes reported in the 1972 Wisden , Yorkshire despite Sellers’ words ‘did not adjust to the bonus points system’, why was the new captain not punished like Close? It was one more reason why Close’s sacking made so little sense outside the committee room. No-one, then or since, has tried to defend the way Sellers did it; not even Sellers. Sir William Worsley, the club president, on television in February 1971 had to admit it had ‘probably been handled in the wrong way’. The acting editor of The Cricketer , Alan Ross, described it as ‘on the face of it … a clumsy and bungled business’; ‘rather odd’, Trevor Bailey called it. In his 1987 autobiography Boycott, who had gained from the sacking, ranked it ‘as one of the cruellest incidents in the history of sport’. Fred Trueman in old age scorned it as ‘another of A.B.Sellers’ masterpieces of man-management’ and was among the many to repeat a story of Close’s. While captain of Somerset Close met Sellers, who confessed that the sacking had proved the worst decision of his life. ‘To give him ten minutes, it’s awful isn’t it,’ said Sid Fielden in 2015, after Close’s death. ‘You hear Closey tell that story, it made you cry. In fact it made Closey cry.’ When something bad happens – a world war, the death of someone in a car accident – we seek reasons, as if reasons make bad things more bearable. So it is with the sacking of Close, ‘the start of something like 30 years of absolute trouble and strife in Yorkshire county cricket,’ as Stott put it; with hindsight, as he admitted. What few successes the club could point to – the Second Eleven won the Minor Counties Championship in 1971 – only highlighted what the first team had lost. ‘One looks for hidden reasons,’ Bill Bowes wrote in the 1972 Wisden , without going on to offer any. You only had to read the gospels; a bad tree could not produce good fruit. Men agreed that Sellers had changed, for the worse. According to John Hampshire, Sellers had gone from ‘the Great Democrat’ as captain, to the ‘Great Autocrat’ as chairman: ‘You did as he said, or else. And to be painfully frank about it, his thinking was that of an age long since gone by.’ As Close and Sellers alike had admitted after the sacking, they had kept their arguments out of the public eye; Close as middle-man between