Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

131 When I’m 64: Illingworth and Close was knocked down in 1972. By sacking Close, Sellers at least showed he was not afraid of change. Sellers however had spent all his credit with the membership by sacking Close. Or rather, Sellers had picked the wrong sort of problem; the challenge for Yorkshire lay not in personnel – one captain or another – but in more profound policy. As new captain, according to his 1987 autobiography, Boycott felt the squad lacked ‘anything like the right blend of talent and experience’. He soon put the point to Sellers that ‘Yorkshire needed some new blood, and pretty quickly’. Without spelling it out, Boycott meant, as Sellers would have understood, signings from overseas; that is, men not Yorkshire-born. Boycott added: I think Sellers agreed but he was not prepared, as chairman of the cricket sub-committee, to invite new controversy by rocking the boat too much. There had been a furore over Close’s departure, and Sellers had come in for a lot of personal criticism; I reckon he just wanted a quiet life for what was left of his association with Yorkshire. Here, beyond the sacking of Close, lay Sellers’ ultimate failure. It was nothing new for easy-beat counties to import players and do better; Northamptonshire recruited Freddie Brown as captain, the West Indian Bertie Clarke, and the Yorkshire wicket-keeper Kenneth Fiddling in the 1940s; and Australians in the 1950s. After a new rule in 1968, every county was doing it – except Yorkshire. At Gloucestershire, an all-rounder such as Mike Procter was the equivalent of an extra man. Or – perhaps the most uncomfortable example of all for Yorkshire – a struggling county such as Derbyshire could revive under an inspirational captain such as Eddie Barlow. Even though in the 1960s and 1970s alike Yorkshire had several men good enough to play for England, the county could not hope to keep beating others with world-class foreigners, unless Yorkshire, too, had one or more men of world class. The harder Boycott tried as a batsman to bridge that gap, the less he had to spare as captain; not a burden Sellers had as a player. Sellers was long gone from power by the time the implications unravelled. Whether Boycott heroically kept Yorkshire from even worse failure, or whether he was part of the problem, was beside the point. That is not to say an overseas player or two would have solved Yorkshire’s troubles, just as the county’s first overseas players did not in the 1990s; many overseas players at many counties did not succeed. Without a ‘foreigner’, Yorkshire had to be at least as united and excellent as they were in Close’s time as captain; and they were not. Sellers had, as even some of his critics agreed, always done what he thought was best; as a steward of the club. He, like others around him, were true conservatives. Having given a lifetime of service, they took that as their perspective; or even longer, as Sellers had followed his father. These men would not change for the sake of it, or without good reason; they wanted to pass the club on soundly to the next stewards. Such conservatives are valid, even vital to resist the self-seekers, windbags and the money-mad that pass through anywhere. The wisest stewards allow change, even drastic, or too much for some, even many, to bear. A far-sighted Yorkshire