Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

45 On the field Sellers turned first and often to Bill Bowes. In Sellers’ eight years as captain before the Second World War, Bowes and Verity were the only two men always among the three who bowled most for Yorkshire in the Championship. Saturday 18 May 1946 at Canterbury was typical. After Yorkshire made 252 in 97.1 overs, Sellers kept Bowes bowling for 11 overs in the last 70 minutes of the day, as Kent slumped to 36 for five. The Times reported ‘two superb catches at backward point by Sellers from crisp strokes by Sunnucks and Valentine’, off Bowes. Then aged 37, Bowes was not as fast as in the 1930s when batsmen from most counties had to duck or be hit or be out when trying to avoid the ball – or all three, as at Chesterfield in May 1934 when Derbyshire captain Arthur Richardson tried to jump out of the way of a shoulder-high ball, and flung his bat to the ground, only for the ball to glance off his hand to Arthur Wood behind the wicket, alongside five slips. Such a definite field, and other evidence, suggests Bowes bowled as Sellers wanted. When Sellers saw Lindwall bowling bouncers in Australia in February 1947, he wrote: ‘Whatever people may say, I think a bouncer is a fair ball, provided it isn’t overdone. The batsman can either play it or leave it alone.’ Sellers, like Jardine when defending bodyline, was cynically forgetting how such short balls – as they always have been and probably always will be – were a way of intimidating out lesser batsmen. At Worcester in July 1934, for instance, Reg Perks ‘tapped up another bumper from Bowes’ to give Sellers a simple catch at silly mid off. Sellers was also forgetting the gifted batsmen carried off the field hurt, such as Walter Keeton (hit on the left cheek at Nottingham in June 1933) and John Langridge (jaw, Hove, August 1932). Indeed, sometimes it sounded as if Bowes were bowling bodyline. During that Nottinghamshire match of June 1933, the Nottingham Journal wrote of Bowes bowling ‘leg theory’ and of Bill Voce – ironically, one of Jardine’s bodyline bowlers – caught off Bowes in a ‘leg trap’, a field used by Bowes as late as 1939, according to newspapers. Lord Hawke disapproved, as he told the county annual meeting in January 1935. If anyone in a Yorkshire cap bowled what Hawke termed ‘direct attack’, he hoped that ‘our captain and every future captain’ would do what he would have done – take the bowler off. Hawke evidently was not watching away matches. A story from Bill Edrich’s 1950 memoir Cricketing Days suggested that Sellers relished how Bowes bowled. According to Edrich, Bowes and Edrich’s captain Robins were having a feud. When Robins went in to bat, Sellers told Bowes: ‘Get thee sweater on lad.’ Verity bowled, then someone in Bowes’ place, and when Robins was due to face the next over, Sellers said: ‘Now Bill, take on at Hedley’s end, now’s thee chance!’ Robins grinned, hit a couple of fours, was hit on the heart, and then caught; and the ill feeling was over. Edrich dated the affair to Lord’s in 1937, except that Robins was only ever caught off Bowes at Sheffield that year. The story suggested Middlesex, who came second in those last four summers before the war, accepted how Yorkshire played. What of other players, spectators, and reporters? Praise of Yorkshire was often sparing. Dour and uncompromising, the Worcester Evening News sports writer T.B.Duckworth called them when