Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

133 Chapter Thirteen Keighley, December 2015 Me, yesterday I was rumour, today I am legend, tomorrow, history. Ian Mudie, They’ll Tell You About Me I came in the dark and left in the dark. I stepped off the train at Keighley and walked the rising path to the street. Before a long day in the town library I wanted something to eat and something to read with it. I bought a Yorkshire Post from the station kiosk, and in the café on the corner ordered eggs and chips. As the day dawned grey I read about Joe Root’s autobiography. They were sock-snipping in the England dressing room now. Sock-snipping! I was no longer sitting in Keighley in 2015; that word took me back to the basement canteen of the Evening Press in York in 1995 when I was the sports editor of the Yorkshire Gazette & Herald . Someone had shown me the internet recently, and I could not see it catching on. I read in the Yorkshire Post , or the Northern Echo , of the then Yorkshire captain David Byas annoyed by a phantom sock-snipper in his dressing room. Why did that, of all things, stick in my head? Because, 20 years later, I would find a use for it? Because of the mystery? Because ruining socks by cutting through them at the heel so offended me? Or because the story gave a rare insight into the true nature of sportsmen, ordinary and even childish? The sock-cutting was happening to the same group of men as Sellers’ – though the personnel had changed a dozen times or more – perhaps even in the same rooms. It’s hard to imagine – and shows the change in outlook, still within living memory – anyone daring to snip Sellers’ socks, or anyone else’s. Men had more respect for socks in Sellers’ day. Money was short enough for most so that when your sock wore thin, you (or more likely your wife or mother) would darn it. To damage a sock, you would have to rise above the taboos against waste and respect for other people’s property. Even then, to play a prank upon anyone in the dressing room, let alone the skipper, suggested that you had time to spare; not only to do the snipping, but to watch for the moment the room was empty. Under Sellers, you never had that time; as Ted Lester recalled: ‘When Yorkshire were batting all the other members of the team were compelled to watch and nobody could disagree with the Sellers argument that only by watching could you learn about the strengths and weaknesses of the