Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

142 ‘worst insult of the lot’ came on Saturday 31 July 1965, when Trueman did not try hard enough to field the ball once in a Roses match, while still trying to put his sweater on after bowling. As his autobiography Ball of Fire in 1976 put it: When I got back to the dressing room Brian Sellers was waiting for me, clearly an angry man. He accused me of not trying, which was ridiculous after I had bowled myself silly to get six wickets [actually five]. And then he called me a bastard in front of everybody. Now I had learned to keep my temper, but sitting there in the dressing room was my elder brother Arthur, a big, proud man. The chairman was the luckiest man in the whole of Yorkshire that day because Arthur is a hard man and very strong from working in the pit and proud of his younger brother, and it would not have surprised me if he had struck him there and then. I managed to smooth things over. If he had said that a few years before I would probably have thumped him myself, but by then I was the senior professional and had to try to set an example. We can query this story of Trueman’s, like others of his. Would Arthur Trueman, miner, really have punched Brian Sellers while a guest, knowing he would land his famous brother in trouble? That Arthur Trueman, an outsider, took offence is significant. Had the players become so used to Sellers’ ‘discipline’ (a codeword for making workers obey without ever asking their point of view) that they were bullied? Not if by bully we mean the boy at school who thumped you unless you gave him your dinner money. At least you and he were equals; often you find the bully is himself bullied, by teachers, or family. We ought instead to compare Sellers with the prefect or teacher who lorded it over the less powerful. On 12 August, the committee suspended Trueman for one match, for ‘reluctance to obey the captain’s instructions on the field’. Any repeat would mean ‘instant dismissal’. That news led the next day’s front page of the Yorkshire Post . Sellers sounded as harsh in print as he did in committee: ‘All Trueman has to do is trip over a match and he is finished.’ At least Sellers was consistent. In July 1952, when Trueman took eight for 31 for England against India at Manchester, he left the field to shower and change his shirt, knowing Hutton would enforce the follow-on. Two weeks later during the Roses match, Sellers confronted Trueman in the toilets. ‘I’ve been wantin’ to have a word with thee. Just who the hell do you think you are, walking off the field first at Old Trafford?’ Trueman explained. ‘I don’t give a bugger about that. In future, wait until you are asked to go off the field first.’ A generation later, as Cope recalled, Sellers would walk the length of the Old Trafford pavilion, ‘knock on our door in the dressing room and say, may I use your toilet; well, he didn’t quite say that; but you have got to imagine what he said’ – again, that strange unwillingness to give the secrets of swearing in the dressing room – ‘and he used the back of our areas.’ Sellers evidently found it hard to give up the players’ physical space – even Keighley, December 2015