Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

138 Keighley, December 2015 drink with the boys. In fact, he liked anything that helped towards making the Yorkshire team the happiest, smartest and most efficient in county cricket. He disliked everything that would interfere with that ambition. Wardle, who also in print called Sellers a ‘strict disciplinarian’, found Sellers a just man: ‘He played (and let everyone know he played) that the game is more than the player and the ship is more than the crew.’ If Sellers’ ambition was Yorkshire’s, did every player’s well-being fit with it? Not always. Here then is a truth about team sport, and any group; the interests of the institution do not match those of the individual, no matter what anyone says to kid themselves or others. It took a captain, Ron Burnet, to give the crucial insight. In a book of tributes to Hutton he was one of the few to say what one man made of another. ‘Len certainly got on all right with Norman [Yardley] – whether he always got on with Brian Sellers I wouldn’t really know. I don’t think anybody really, really got on with Sellers.’ Was it coincidence that Sellers was the most successful county captain of all time, and Yardley only shared one Championship? Did getting on with your fellow players get in the way of winning? Just as a general has to harden himself to order men into battle, where some will die, so the cricket captain cannot allow himself to feel too warm towards any player, that he may have to order to do something not in his best interests – bat recklessly to make quick runs so that the team can declare; or stand down for a younger man, who will take his place for good if he does well enough. The leader – captain or committee chairman – sometimes has to tell an untruth to motivate. Ted Lester as second team captain understood this on Thursday 20 August 1959, at Bridlington. On the second day of two, having made Lincolnshire follow on, only two wickets had fallen by tea. As I walked off the field the chairman collared me and said when you get back to the dressing room I want you to tell those lazy so and sos that this just won’t do. If there isn’t a vast improvement after tea I will be looking for some new players. Now go and get a cup of tea and do what I say. Just before we went back on to the field I simply said to the players the chairman is not very satisfied with our performance this afternoon so let’s go out and really show him what we can do. The seconds took the last wickets and left themselves three overs to make 29; they finished one short. As they sat disappointed in the dressing room there was a knock on the door: ‘Well done boys. That was an excellent performance,’ Sellers said. ‘Now when you have got changed if you will come into the bar I will buy you all a drink.’ Sellers did, ‘and as he and I were having a quiet conversation’, Lester recalled 40 years later, ‘he said something which I can never forget’: You know they weren’t doing too badly this afternoon when I arrived but it never does any good to let them know that. Far better to express dissatisfaction with a view to getting a bit out of them and if you can get a little bit extra out of everyone it can mean the difference between winning