Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

144 1966 he lived at Heather Bank, ten minutes’ walk away, in the village of Eldwick. Then as now it was on the edge where man’s building ended and nature began. Little if any traffic passes and you can hear birdsong and the rush of a stream, out of sight down deep banks. It is a place of drystone walls; somewhere to retreat to. By 1978 he was living at 34 Southway in Eldwick, a bungalow about halfway between his previous two homes, on a somewhat windswept height, with a more distant view of the moors. The front and back gardens were small, far smaller than Heather Bank’s. It was a place for an old man to live quietly in, until he was dead. In his obituary of Sellers in February 1981, Kilburn called the captain ‘forthright’ (again) ‘and devoted in obligation to duty’. John Arlott in the Guardian captured the essence of the captain and committee man. Tall, strong-necked, high-shouldered – and he generally hunched them hostilely higher than they really were – fit and alert, he led his team with unfailingly truculent purpose; though he had a sharp sense of humour. He brooked neither slackness nor argument in his players – his discipline was questioned only at the cost of dismissal – but he would have gone to the scaffold in support of their loyal effort. He learnt much of strategy from the many shrewd cricketers who served under him: but if he erred, they would support him, or he would know the reason why. After playing, Sellers according to Arlott was ‘characteristically inflexible, putting county loyalty and discipline above all other considerations. He was not always sympathetic, nor imaginative; he could be savagely intolerant.’ Hardly a personality to want to remember. ‘He never, though, wavered from his belief in the traditional values of cricket as played and administered in Yorkshire since the last century.’ While more creditable, that left Sellers in the past. Another reason why Sellers’ name has not lasted well is that Arlott judged Sellers ‘not worth his place as a player … but there can be no doubt that his captaincy added immensely to the county’s strength’. The service of any amateur captain, and the service given to him by the professional players, have gone right out of fashion in a society that prizes the professions – and whose qualified members are so keen to keep it that way. Professional sports teams have so many coaches now, a club can pick the captain out of the eleven and get by. In any case the work of a captain has always been less visible than the six- hits of a batsman or the fast bowler who makes stumps fly. Besides, the break between the old and the new since the 1960s has uprooted cricket from its past. The young have nothing to learn from the old; hence the fall in interest in cricket’s past; and if it wasn’t televised, you can hardly prove that it happened. Perhaps the cricketers of the 21 st century, who shower and drive away as soon as they can after play, are right. To them it is only a job; those clashes between players and Sellers, each side caring so much about their club, make no sense in an age when few players stay anywhere more than a few seasons. The counties have become so even, it’s hard to see anyone ever matching the record of Sellers, or Surridge or Close. If anyone looks that good, they move for more money, and chances are that England will take them, and their county will never see them until Keighley, December 2015