Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

130 When I’m 64: Illingworth and Close players and committee, as Sellers had been when captain. Ironically, not only in his success, but how he rallied his players, Close ‘in many ways was very like Sellers’, John Hampshire wrote later. As Hampshire saw it, Illingworth’s move brought about ‘the downfall of Yorkshire cricket’, as Illingworth – without a formal title, or appreciation by the club – did so much for the team, and for Close. Boycott, like Churchill, has had the knack of writing his own history. His 2014 memoir came with a moving title that spoke of his new perspective on life, as a father, and after recovering from cancer: The Corridor of Certainty . Most of the 23 on the general committee were weak and did not want to challenge the cricket committee members, who were mainly former players, he said. ‘How do you convince people like Brian Sellers, who had been amateur captain of Yorkshire, that he is wrong?’ Sellers, and others, were ‘not bad men but they were stuck in their ways, and they did not realise that the game had moved on since their day’. Boycott convinces, yet begs further questions. Why did the club have so many on a committee, that invited long discussions before any decision? Because the club was always a compromise, between the many parts of such a large county, each proud and careful to keep its committee places and fixtures. Put another way, towns and ridings were forever jealous of each other, and above all Leeds. Only such a large committee could satisfy every district. To decide anything - and the club had to keep picking a team, making room for some and disappointing others – the club needed an ‘autocrat’, such as Lord Hawke or Sellers; provided, as in any tyranny, that the man in power was trustworthy. Just as a batsman is only as good as his last innings, so a chairman is only as good as his last decision. Bryan Stott wondered if Sellers received second or third opinions; and if he did, whether he took notice. Sellers is not the first or the last man in power who has made a decision so unwise that it was bad for everyone; even himself. In 1914, the emperors of Germany, Austria and Russia each agreed to a war that left their families deposed or murdered. This is something for humanity to address, if it is serious about surviving as a species. Steve Troth, a printing apprentice at the Sellers’ factory at the time, recalled turning up for work in Bradford after the Close sacking ‘to find that every single window in the building had been smashed!’. Sellers’ son Andrew recalled Jack Mewies as ‘this fool’; ‘and idiots from Skipton; we had a rent a crowd bus at the AGM; that basically was the end of father, was that. Times I have been talking to him and all he has been saying, well, it’s only a bloody game for Christ’s sake; he couldn’t understand the way the whole thing had gone around, not against him, but generally against his view of the cricketing world, which eventually I think put him on the road to the end, somehow. He sort of gave up a bit after that. Apart from that, he got the dreadful rheumatoid arthritis so he couldn’t do much so it was a bit of a sad end to his career.” Sellers only had to keep his eyes open to see change. A stone’s throw from Keighley’s cricket club, Holy Trinity Church in Lawkholme Lane, where his parents baptised him in 1907 and where his father had his funeral service,