Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

57 bat at the end, and was one not out. And what made life harder for Sellers, to repeat, was that he never reached the team on merit. He had to keep the final say on decisions to himself, and he had to impose himself to earn it; hence that crucial confrontation off the field at Oxford in 1932. Paradoxically, once he had authority, he was most likely to be successful, and so keep his power, by seeking advice. For example, Sellers reportedly consulted Sutcliffe and Verity before he declared overnight at Hull in July 1934, leaving Essex the last day to make 255. As Yorkshire won by 123 runs, the decision might look correct and simple. The Sheffield Daily Telegraph called it ‘very sporting’. If Sellers had batted on, and given Essex less time to make more runs, Yorkshire would have made it harder to lose; but also to win, as they had less time to take ten wickets. The captain forever had to balance; opposition batsmen against his bowlers, the pros and cons of practical jokes – ‘the good captain must see that they are kept within reasonable bounds, or else his team will go to pieces’, Hammond advised – and the well-being of his ten men, who off the field were as frail as anyone else. A captain had to know who to turn to, because it was as foolish to ask the ignorant for advice as it was to ignore the wisest; not only then would the captain have poor advice, but the team would see that the captain did not know his men. It made sense for the captain to turn to some men more than others; yet he could not have – nor be seen to have – favourites; others would resent that, and the team would no longer be united. Often Sellers had to be decisive; if any captain took too long to declare, that in itself was a decision not to declare, and it made a draw ever more likely. Yorkshire folk had long memories: when the Yorkshire Evening Post announced in August 1946 that Sellers would report for it from Australia on that winter’s MCC tour of Australia, it made a neat pun: ‘Sellers has never lacked courage in his decisions on the field – he put the 1938 Australians in to bat at Sheffield and got desperately near to beating them – and he has never lacked courage in his declarations when talking off the field of the game.’ Other decisions spoke of the team’s culture, that Sellers, the leader, was only expressing. It may seem extraordinary that county cricketers played on Friday 1 September 1939, the day that Germany invaded Poland; in fairness, Britain only declared war on the Sunday, an extraordinary wait in hindsight. Yorkshire were already champions. As newspapers reported, that Friday morning, the Yorkshire club suggested cutting short their match at Hove. Sellers replied ‘that his team would prefer to play it out as the game had been set aside for the benefit of Jim Parks’, of Sussex. In his memoir Thanks to Cricket , Jim Kilburn wrote of ‘an impromptu team meeting’. Whether Kilburn heard it first hand or second, Sellers said: ‘We are public entertainers, and until we have instructions to the contrary we carry Off the field Sussex all-rounder Jim Parks.