Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

148 Thanks and sources Before I came this far, I thought I would enjoy this part the most; instead I have felt the numb sadness at the end of a journey in good company. It began, I know now, on Friday 27 January 2012, in the centre of Manchester. I finished a job by mid-afternoon and on my way to Piccadilly station stopped at the second-hand book stall on the corner by the Arndale shopping centre. I was rummaging in a cardboard box of papers about cricket and came upon several sheets of handwriting on lined A4 paper. The words were of someone in conversation; it had nothing to identify who was speaking or writing the words. I had to rescue it. I was careful to choose a few books too, so that the stall-holder did not see how precious the papers were to me. I forget how much I paid; about £10 the lot. Some of the interview, which ran to 2000 words, went in my history of English cricket, The Summer Field . Once I had given myself a rest after writing that, I began on Brian Sellers; because the man speaking could only be him. The interview seemed to date after Illingworth left the club, and before the row over Close going: between summer 1968 and autumn 1970. Who took down the words; and why were they (and no others) in a cardboard box? I should have bought the whole box; I could have carried it; I have been back since, but it was no longer there. I assumed the interview was genuine, if only because: why would someone forge it, and leave it in a cardboard box?! I got it into my head that the former Fleet Street sports reporter, and historian of the Yorkshire club, Derek Hodgson, had done the interview. I met his son Myles at the 2015 annual conference of the British Society of Sports History (BSSH), who passed me on to his father, who told me he was not the interviewer. The only likely interview I have found was by Richard Dodd in the Yorkshire Post on 4 February 1969, which like the anonymous one ranged over Sellers’ playing years and the present, although some of the interview in print was not in the longer handwritten one. Through Martin Howe, the biographer of Norman Yardley, I wrote to and spoke to Sidney Fielden, who gave me the idea of speaking to Geoff Cope. I am grateful to the Yorkshire club for passing my letter on to Cope, secretary of the Yorkshire former players’ association. It turns out that I have been gathering material for this work for five decades, without knowing it, as the first England tour I followed was of Australia in 1978/79, and one of the first cricket books I read was Geoff Boycott’s Put to the Test . For Sellers’ family background and early life I looked at Keighley newspapers upstairs in Keighley’s fine Carnegie library; and the Telegraph & Argus , in Bradford library. I learned useful background about the Yorkshire club in