Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

32 Len Hutton Bowes and Verity had made their names before Sellers arrived; Hutton made his under Sellers. Hutton however looked to Sutcliffe. ‘Little Herbert’, C.B.Fry called Hutton in August 1936. In his second match, at Oxford in May 1934, the Oxford Mail reported how ‘Yorkshire have the greatest faith in him as a number one batsman of the near future’. Four years later, the same newspaper praised him as ‘an England number one all right’. His rise in between was not quite as smooth as it looked afterwards. On his Championship debut at Edgbaston in May 1934, batting at five, he made 50; however the Birmingham Post complained of Yorkshire’s slow scoring. Worst of all, ‘at the height of the afternoon when there were only five wickets down and over 300 runs on the board the champion county of England was represented by a partnership that scored eight runs in 25 minutes!’. That was between Hutton and Sellers, who was caught for three off George Paine – another example of him falling to a slow bowler. Hutton was not quite 18. The county evidently saw his talents – his temperament as much as his sound batting – and gave him time to blossom, so that by the 1937 challenge match, when he anchored the innings with 121, the Daily Worker could praise him as ‘very good indeed. He has modelled his defensive strokes on Sutcliffe’s and has a lovely drive through the covers that travels very fast and that he seems in no danger of mistiming.’ At the timeless Test against Australia in August 1938, Hutton made his monumental, Bradman-beating 364. His hometown of Pudsey put on a dinner for him; Sellers was among the speakers. According to the Yorkshire Post , Sellers gave the 22-year-old some ‘sound advice’: ‘Don’t live in the past. Forget what you have done and the records you have made and broken. Get stuck into what is before you.’ Sellers was the mouthpiece for the Yorkshire way of cricket; never satisfied, always looking for the next triumph. For one night, among Hutton’s kith and kin, could Sellers not have given it a rest? The line that disciplines the fell Len Hutton and Alderman Myers, Mayor of Pudsey, at the dinner in honour of Hutton in October 1938.