Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

145 their thirties, and by then few feel like giving more years to ‘their’ county. So much of the world as in Sellers’ head has gone; cricket and otherwise. The men of Sellers’ time have gone too, or grown old. Now it is too late, they understand that it is wrong to put your faith in one man, if it means you are blind to the point of view of another; or to love one group, if it means you hate another. In short, they learned compassion, for others and themselves. Geoff Cope asked Sellers to speak at a dinner for his benefit. I met him at the stairs and I gave him one of the benefit ties and he looked at me and there was a filling up in the eyes, and he said, get on with you, and he sent me packing, and then he saw me later and said, now you never tell anybody you saw me like that; but nobody has ever given me a tie before. That’s a soft emotional side of what is described as a very hard man. As Cope’s benefit year was 1980, perhaps Sellers only felt such sentiment, or only let it show, at the very end of his life. Who are we to judge? Even towards the end, Sellers felt he had to keep up his reputation. As what? A man given power, who used it. What else was he supposed to do with it? Sellers hurt others and made mistakes; who has not? Most of us have not known what it is like to be in power – often because, in so many clubs, and democracies, most members and citizens don’t want the trouble. If anyone judges him, it should be the players. Sellers, though blinkered, was ‘Yorkshire through and through’, as Bryan Stott put it. ‘If only men like him would use their power with more discretion, advising instead of trying to dictate,’ Trueman said in Ball of Fire Heatherbank, on the edge of the moors at Eldwick outside Bingley, the Sellers’ later 1960s home. Keighley, December 2015