Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

37 Chapter Four On the field A good side works like a good machine, but this is not to say that it works mechanically. Douglas Jardine ‘One saw at a glance why Yorkshire could win a Championship and hold it,’ the Australian journalist A.G.Moyes wrote after rain saved the tourists at Sheffield in July 1938. ‘They looked a team.’ As so often, the exceptions gave insights into the rule, and the exceptions were Yorkshire’s matches against tourists and at the Scarborough festival. The former England captain Freddie Brown recalled how Sellers enjoyed himself at Scarborough, ‘quite often in a funny little red schoolboy’s cap’. Once, when Brown was waiting to bat for the Gentlemen versus Players, in September 1938, Sellers …. was batting with the late Denys Wilcox, who hit a ball to the far corner of the ground with mid-on setting off on a long chase. The sight of Sellers going up and down the wicket with enormous long strides, and of Wilcox doing likewise with short fast ones, was an absolute joy, and what made it even better was that Sellers lapped Wilcox by the time he had completed a third run. On ran Sellers regardless, until Wilcox, so overcome with laughter, could run no more. He was put down in the scorebook as ‘run out’ …. Even at Scarborough, Sellers was no less keen to make runs – and to get men out. When Brown was batting for the South against the North, in September 1946, Brown was called for a second run: The bowler, standing about four yards away from the wicket was about to catch the ball when a shriek from the fielding captain, Sellers, persuaded him to duck and let the return go through. The ball hit the wicket when I was still about a yard out. I’ve always had a look to see who was at third man ever since. The South African captain Dudley Nourse called Sellers ‘one of the most likeable personalities I have ever met on any tour’, ‘an able leader’ and ‘a real humourist’, and recalled his sharp single in July 1947 at Bramall Lane: He fled down the wicket to the delight of the spectators and continued his run on to the soccer pitch which forms part of that huge arena and there played by himself an imaginary game of soccer. It was all done quite spontaneously and we enjoyed the fun quite as much as the crowd did. The eve of a match, the toss, could be a time for fun with a like-minded fellow captain, such as Surrey’s Errol Holmes. In one of his playing days memoirs, Hutton told the harmless story of how, as the two captains