Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

31 The line that disciplines the fell Cooper’s stumps: ‘Sellars [sic] immediately crowded in the fielders around the batsman and in the same over Cooper jumped out desperately and was bowled,’ off the fourth ball of Verity’s fourth over, before he had given away a run. He took ten wickets in the match as Yorkshire won by an innings. Verity, then, was a bowler of power. Did Sellers, understandably, ask too much of him, as ‘his stock bowler’, as Sir Home Gordon claimed in The Cricketer magazine in May 1937? By August 1939 E.M.Wellings claimed to see ‘a sign of staleness’ in Verity. Verity was good-natured, men agreed. In his 1936 book Bowling ’EmOut , he must have been writing of himself as ‘the chap who just smiles and keeps on doing his best’, despite dropped catches. Like Sutcliffe, however, Verity wrote suspiciously little about Sellers. Was that only out of caution, so as not to make trouble; because he had little good to say; or as a deliberate snub? An admiring 1952 biography of Verity ended with tributes from his old headmaster, his father, Yorkshire president Sir Stanley Jackson, fellow England players Sutcliffe and Charles Barnett, and his regiment; not Sellers, whose tribute Wisden (no less) had printed. Was Sellers not welcome? In January 1947, while Sellers was reporting in Australia on the MCC tour, the occasional bowler Norman Yardley sensationally got Bradman out twice. Sellers wrote that everyone was asking if Yardley would open the bowling for Yorkshire the next season (actually, Yardley had a few times already): I have had to remind them with a smile that Hedley Verity opened the England innings out here on one tour and that when he returned to Yorkshire I said to him that he might be number one for England but he was still number ten for Yorkshire! Even the best-natured man might close his heart to someone who could sound so unfeeling. Charles Barnett, Gloucestershire and England batsman.