Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

141 Keighley, December 2015 might have resented it. Any leader that hired and unhired would cause as much upset as happiness. A player cast out of the team, or not let in at all, might blame himself for not being good enough. Just as above the gate at Auschwitz the Nazis placed a sign, ‘Jedem das seine’, ‘everyone gets what he deserves’, so Bird and almost every player at some stage would feel the same; if he hadn’t had enough chances to succeed, he had to accept it was on merit, otherwise the whole system was in the wrong. Why then accept the tyrant, with power to ruin your career? Because, although we are not supposed to admit it, because we so pride ourselves on our democracy, in a country where a good many of us never vote: we like rule by a tyrant, because it saves us from hard choices. From having to bother. * Not that tyranny is best; not necessarily. The Yorkshire committee not only got its own way, but presented the face it wanted to the world; the one that made it look good, naturally. Hence it insisted in November 1959 on Burnet’s ‘retirement’. In a letter to John Nash the club secretary, released to the press, Burnet wrote he had ‘discussed’ with ‘Mr Sellers’, ‘and I was willing, if required, to do another year, but have decided that as the team is now on the right lines and bearing in mind my own limitations as a first-class cricketer, it would best serve the interests of Yorkshire cricket if I retired and made way for a younger man.’ In truth Burnet did not want to go and Sellers made him, and Burnet agreed not to rock the boat; to take another comparison from a 20 th century tyranny, Stalin had Russian Communist leaders arrested and shot, who as a last service to the Party agreed to pretend they were spies and wreckers. Sellers, like Stalin, needless to say, never had to go through his own treatment; Sellers stood down from the county committee only in 1980, the last full year of his life. Few players were as wise as Bryan Stott and Fred Trueman, and gave up while they could still choose. In his memoirs, Trueman recalled how in 1968 he handed his letter to the president, Sir William Worsley, then drove to see Sellers. I gave Brian Sellars [sic] my letter. He invited me to sit down and poured us a drink. At one point during our conversation Brian said something that puzzled me. He told me that, inadvertently, perhaps, I had helped the Yorkshire committee out of a difficult situation. Trueman wondered if the club was planning to sack Close, and offer him the captaincy. ‘But we are talking here of the Yorkshire committee, a body of people not exactly known to display loyalty to players, an administration not known for always making the right decisions.’ Like politicians, who will speak well (or not at all) of rivals and enemies when they are dead, Sellers did at least have a habit of giving tributes to retiring players. Sellers said of Trueman: ‘Although it is with very great regret that we part with him, I am sure that in his own interests he has done the right thing.’ These were the same two men who, as Fred Trueman recalled in old age, had ‘some monumental clashes’. After Taunton in 1962 – when Trueman could easily have gone, had he not held his temper – the