Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

56 Off the field enter the dressing room, but like all journalists, they had to trade access for discretion. The players might have felt embarrassed if dressing room affairs became public. If a journalist reported anything they saw or heard inside the dressing room, the players would lose their privacy; they would not be able to trust the journalists, or each other. It was not worth a journalist losing that trust for the sake of one story, however revealing. Willie Watson for instance in his 1956 autobiography recalled how he cowered when Sellers told Hutton off for arriving less than an hour before a match. By then, Hutton was about retired; and Watson in any case left Yorkshire for Leicestershire in 1958. Was the autobiography, that was bound to be too indiscreet for someone, a cause of Watson leaving; or a sign that he was too independently-minded to stay happily at Yorkshire much longer? Telling tales of the dressing room broke a taboo; and if you did it in a book, were you doing it all the time, in conversation? As late as 2014, Geoffrey Boycott – one of the youngest players to experience Sellers – described how the culture in his playing career was ‘to keep everything within the dressing room’. It made sense; if you told your opponents anything, it might give them heart, or they might use it against you. Boycott added: ‘We all knew deep down that if you betrayed that trust, the chairman of Yorkshire, Brian Sellers, would sack you.’ Such a culture was all the more powerful because it was ‘deep down’, unwritten and unspoken; self-imposed. At 11.50 am on Friday 14 June 1935 at Edgbaston, Yorkshire began batting; they had 40 minutes before lunch, and then the last four hours of the match, to make 315 to win. That they made 225 for three after 87 overs might suggest they chose to draw, for three points; rather than risk defeat, and none. As the Birmingham Post put it the next day, ‘the path of safety was preferred’. Dour Yorkshire? As so often, the truth was in the detail. Sutcliffe began briskly, clearly ‘inspired by a determination to strive for victory’, as the Post reported; only he was bowled for 24 out of 27 just before lunch. Hutton, the other opener, retired on 17 at 59, ‘far from well’. Nor could Yorkshire do as they pleased; the Warwickshire captain Bob Wyatt set his field to keep run-making down, and his bowlers bowled wide of the off stump (who was not playing ‘bright’ cricket?!). From what happened on the field, we can guess that off the field Yorkshire agreed a plan; they began by trying to win, and once it became too risky to keep up with the clock, only then did they indeed prefer safety. Just as batsmen had to adapt, to the state of a match, so the captain had a balancing act. He had to keep the confidence of his men by staying in control, and being seen to have control; except that by the rules of the game, batsmen when on the field were on their own. On that Friday at Edgbaston, Sellers only went out to Warwickshire and England captain Bob Wyatt.