Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

139 Keighley, December 2015 and losing. As I remembered the times he had subjected us to this treatment I could only think, you crafty devil. Bowes was right; Sellers was only interested in performances. Kilburn, as early as 1950, saw it all: Sometimes the players thought he was carrying determination beyond the point of reason, sometimes his discipline was considered harsh and sometimes he was less than tactful, but his mistakes were those of a man with the strongest sense of duty conscious of carrying a responsibility beyond personal considerations. He neither courted favour nor feared unpopularity and he never shirked a task, however distasteful, which he regarded as part of the duty of his office. The crucial words here are ‘responsibility’ and above all ‘duty’; to a cause, a thing, the Yorkshire club, that Sellers felt he had to work to, regardless of men; even – and this would have helped Sellers win his team over - himself. When two batsmen find that either of them could be run out, you can see where power lies; who chooses, or refuses, to be run out. Tellingly, Sellers did not insist that players respect his rank. In June 1937 at Headingley, Sellers was run out when Turner sent him back, ’when Sellers ill-advisedly started for a run for a shot by Turner’. As the batsman more set, and one higher than him in the batting order, Turner was more important to the team than Sellers; Turner did not feel obliged to suffer for Sellers’ error. How did Sellers view his players, whether as captain or chairman? According to Don Mosey Sellers’ outlook was feudal, ‘more feudal than any venerable MCC Committeeman at Lord’s’ (which forgot that Sellers did indeed put in years at Marylebone). Sellers was like a ‘medieval condottiere to his mercenaries’; or ‘like a medieval baron exercising feudal rights’. Mosey did not get his history right; mercenaries notoriously took money and avoided fighting. Mosey had a point; he was suggesting that Sellers demanded – and got – something more than the industrial routine, of work in return for a wage; something aggressive, almost military, based on those intangibles of loyalty to a man, when captain; and duty to an institution, when chairman. Sellers sailed with good humour through the clashes over manners that can arise on any field of play. E.M.Wellings, a fellow journalist on the 1946/47 tour of Australia, recalled a match between the Australian and English press and a school; when an unnamed pompous pressman was disgusted that the agency reporter Norman Preston wore a wrist watch on the field, Sellers prompted the ten fielders to wear their watches. ‘I was one ‘old cock sparrer’ who had plenty of time for Brian Sellers,’ Wellings reminisced. That probably said as much about Wellings – a stickler for standards, and not shy to say so – as Sellers. With his love of gesture and strong opinion, Sellers ought to run through players’ memoirs of the 1930s to the 1960s like a stick of rock. Where he doesn’t, it’s telling. Hutton lay depressed in a Wakefield hospital bed in 1941, wondering if he would ever play cricket again after breaking his arm; in his mind’s eye he saw his ‘chums in the Yorkshire team’; Mitchell, Barber, Sutcliffe, Leyland, Wood, Verity and Bowes; a long list, but no