Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

134 Keighley, December 2015 opposition.’ Lester shuddered to think what Sellers would have done to players sunbathing, or watching television and not the match. Teams of the past, that we see in sepia photographs with set faces, look more solemn; they were not. Practical jokes were always a part of cricket, Hammond wrote, ‘but the good captain must see that they are kept within reasonable bounds’. Sellers’ teams welcomed a joke, precisely because they were always busy; fielding, batting, watching others bat, the opponents bowl; signing autographs. If Sellers’ men had any spare time or energy, they had to put it towards a purpose; of becoming better cricketers, or simply to remain useful enough to the team. What a contrast with the sock- snipper in Byas’ time, who had too much imagination; maybe a grudge, or thwarted ambition. The snipping plainly riled Byas, and with reason, for it undermined his authority. The snipper was mocking the skipper. Sock-snipping has become a part of modern English cricket folklore; a tradition to keep up, even. It must answer a psychological need in some; or, it binds a group. To have cut Sellers’ socks would have simply been beyond the mind of his players. We can no more imagine it than we can imagine Bill Bowes with his hair dyed red, or Maurice Leyland rapping. * Nothing really changed after Sellers retired as chairman, said Boycott; Sellers stayed on the general committee, ‘where he was able to still rule the club with an iron fist’. Yorkshire had the worst of all worlds; the old tyrant was out of office, and the new chairman was John Temple, a committee man from York since 1956, ‘a weak, malleable man’ according to Boycott. As captain, Boycott was a witness; yet Geoff Cope showed more practically the difference in regimes. In 1970 Cope was ‘on trial’ at Lord’s, as the newspapers put it, for a suspicious bowling action. When ‘this problem’ began, as Cope called it in later life, Sellers was ‘very supportive’: He was a man of colourful language and suggested that I put my backside on Pudsey station at such and such a time to get the morning train. And he got on at Bradford, I got on at Pudsey and with him was Arthur Mitchell, who was then the coach, Ticker Mitchell. And if I say I got good morning, sit there, and the next time we spoke we were in London; but in between he and Arthur had talked about the game of cricket and it was probably one of the finest educations that I had had, just listening to these two reminiscing, bringing the modern game in, as it was in those days, and saying how things had changed. We got down there and he spoke up on my behalf and I was very grateful to him for his support. Andrew Sellers added how his father ‘spoke up’: ‘… so father said, come on Geoff, we will wait until they get a decent committee together, then we will come back, let us know when you have got a mixed committee, you are all southerners, and we are not listening to it. They came back on the train.’ Cope recalled that his bowling action came up again, under the new chairman, ‘and I said, oh, when do we go to Lord’s? The answer was, oh,