Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

52 Yorkshire went, they were the main draw, and not only in the boom for all leisure after 1945. Long-serving players of other counties regularly chose the Yorkshire match for their benefit. Cricket then had a bigger place in English sport than since, and counties had a bigger place in English cricket. In August 1946, the biggest crowd at Leicester that season – an estimated 5000 – had to sit around a shortened boundary. This happened when Australia toured too; something else Yorkshire had in common with them. The local press took photographs, usually on the first day, either of the team taking the field, or the best-known players before play or at lunch, such as of Sellers and Alan Melville returning from the luncheon tent at Hove on Wednesday 28 August 1935, each man wearing a blazer (and Melville his pads as the not-out batsman). And everyone wanted Yorkshire autographs. While any cricketer may weary of the attention, Sellers at least sometimes obliged – which became another good news photograph. The Leicester Evening Mail in August 1938 for instance ran a picture of Sellers sitting on grass during an interval, and at least ten boys (some wearing school caps) around him. As the caption beneath explained, the ‘besieged’ Sellers ‘found it handier to sit down to the task’. A year earlier, Sellers was standing in the middle before Yorkshire batted a second time, ‘considering very intently what preparation the wicket required’, the Leicester Mercury reported. Sellers hardly noticed the ‘youthful autograph hunter’: ‘Groundsman White did however. He drove him off very much in the manner of an indignant gardener scaring away a flock of poultry from a newly sown flower garden.’ At Chesterfield in July 1939, Sellers had less on his mind. On the Monday afternoon, of what proved a blank second day, Sellers and the Derbyshire captain Thomas Hounsfield were on their way to inspect the pitch, when ‘Mr T Mycroft of Somercotes, son of the famous Derbyshire cricketer, continually clapped’, so the Derby Evening Telegraph reported. ‘Eventually Sellers turned around and beckoned to Mr Mycroft to accompany him on the inspection. Mr Mycroft did so and he was engaged in conversation with the two captains at the wicket for some time.’ Whether Sellers did it to shut a critic up, or brighten his rain- ruined day, he was showing interest in the crowd. He was acknowledging that a county cricketer, let alone the Yorkshire captain, could not insist on privacy, on or off the field. Neither place was quite private, or public. The crowd might not spot Sellers’ signals to move his fielders – and Sellers certainly did not want the batsmen to see – but the players on the field were there to be applauded, hooted at or judged like cattle at market. Off the field, privacy, even Masonic-like secrecy, was possible; except you were forever passing from private places into public; whatever you did might have public consequences. On the third day of that Australian tour match at Sheffield in 1938, Yorkshire needed only 67 with seven wickets in hand, when it began raining at lunch. At the last inspection at 4 pm, some disappointed spectators booed. A.G.Moyes wrote of how Sellers from the middle ‘waved away the match’: He left the onlookers in no doubt. There was no secret conclave in the dressing-room and a subsequent whispering that this one or that had not wanted to continue. Sellers in his gesture was as definite as [umpire Frank] On the field