Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

143 the most intimate. Sportsmen, understandably, do not want to admit they are too old to belong any longer; nor do they like to stop earning a living. What made it worse – in Sellers’ time, and after - was that so many mistook the Yorkshire club for something more than a place of work. Wardle admitted in his final article in 1958, ‘for a proud Yorkshireman to leave Yorkshire is a big wrench’. Close said on television in 1971: ‘If I am guilty of anything it is probably that I was too fervent.’ Geoff Boycott, sacked as Yorkshire captain in 1978, said at the end of Put to the Test , his book on the 1978/79 tour of Australia: ‘Yorkshire is an emotional thing for me.’ All three cared too much about an institution that could not care for them back. During the Wardle affair, before Wardle’s three newspaper articles, Swanton wrote: ‘If a family do not get along it is better for them to agree to differ than to nag at one another under the same roof.’ While Swanton was right enough, a county cricket club is not a family. For the players, it is their employer, like a factory, or the pit. In their confusion, the players were asking for trouble. In Sellers, Wardle and Close found a chairman hard enough to give them that trouble. The committees after Sellers, in their weakness, merely spun out the trouble for Boycott, and themselves. * Sellers and Bright began married life in a Bingley cul-de-sac, Langley Avenue. By 1948, when the Yorkshire club annual listed him as a committee member for Bradford, they lived five minutes’ walk away, at Rustlewood, Parkside. Then as now it stands on the right as you climb the valley out of town. Over the road are woods, good for Sellers to walk the dog. From Rustlewood, above Bingley, the Sellers’ 1950s home. Keighley, December 2015