Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

22 Sellers and son I expect them to be obeyed. I know you’re not good enough but we can’t have a captain of Yorkshire going into the field not wearing the county’s cap. I don’t like it, I said. ‘You’ve no choice,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow you will go back and apologise to the secretary and accept the cap.’ You see it was the principle that mattered. A club could hardly send its captain onto the field, for all to see, without a club cap, and of lesser status than some of his men. It did Sellers credit that he did not feel equal to the men under him, and understood that capped players might hold his unearned cap against him; but that would not help him much in trying to win their respect. It helped that he looked the part at first sight. When Sellers took Yorkshire to Worcester in 1933, the county’s first visit since 1929, Berrow’s Worcester Journal called Sellers ‘a veritable giant’. In Sellers’ time, only Bill Bowes at six foot four was a couple of inches taller. Presumably because Yorkshire drew its professionals from the working class, who had hard lives and ate poorly, most were small; of 27 players listed at pre-season practice in 1926, the tallest was five foot 11. Sellers meant business; in a 1931 Keighley team photograph, he kneeled in the centre of five players, his sleeves rolled to the elbows, while most of his men were wearing sweaters. He had physical presence; he had to back it with words and deeds.