Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

63 Batsman, fielder, bowler – and England captain? sympathy for the Australians: ‘I think it is a question of the boot on the other leg and they don’t like it. Yorkshire have had a lot of this kind of bowling to play against especially when we were playing Nottinghamshire but you never found Yorkshire squealing.’ None of this necessarily made him very successful at batting. In his 1941 sketch, Robertson-Glasgow called him ‘no more than a good batsman’: … strong, tall, long in the reach, a stubborn or violent number six according to need; but as a fielder, especially in the close positions, he is often brilliant. His bowling, I have heard him say, has distinct possibilities, never fully appreciated or developed by the captain. Again – and Robertson-Glasgow left his readers to appreciate it – Sellers was telling a joke against himself, as he was the captain that never bowled himself enough. That touched on the problem for every captain; even if you had skills as a leader, you had to justify yourself as a cricketer. Like any batsman, he scored unevenly. He averaged 23 for Yorkshire. He did poorly in London, averaging only 17 at The Oval and 14 at Lord’s; yet he averaged 26.4 against Middlesex. Did playing away make a difference? Again, there seemed no pattern; at Manchester he averaged 45, which was nearer his home than Chesterfield, where he averaged only 12; and both were nearer him than Scarborough, where he averaged under 21. Derbyshire in that era excelled in seam bowlers; except that half the time at Chesterfield, the leg-spinner Tommy Mitchell got Sellers out. So it was around the counties for all his career. When Sellers made that 61 not out at Bramall Lane in June 1932, the Sheffield Daily Telegraph reported that ‘his judgement was at fault occasionally especially when he grew over-confident in playing [Jim] Sims’ leg breaks’. At Lord’s against MCC in 1937, Sellers ‘tried to hit Robins over Father Time’, and was stumped. And at Sheffield in June 1946 Sellers played to the pitch of the ball on the off, ‘but it swept around his legs to knock back his leg stump’, and Sellers was bowled for three by the 48-year-old Johnny Clay (his fingers ‘still packed with cunning’). In an age when many counties had leg-spinners, this weakness of Sellers – in Kilburn’s verdict, ‘he tended to play spin bowling after the manner of submarine navigation – by guess and by God’ – could have been crippling. Sellers managed; he averaged nearly 28 against Warwickshire, for instance, despite Eric Hollies and George Paine; and 26 against Kent, despite Tich Freeman and then Doug Wright. Reporters and no doubt players noticed. At Sheffield in July 1937, the Middlesex leg-spinner Tuppy Owen-Smith caught and bowled him. ‘I still think he would do better to go down the pitch to them and chance his keen eye and powerful shoulders,’ the Sheffield Telegraph reckoned. Even in 1951, playing for Yorkshire ‘old masters’ in a charity match at Headingley, Sellers was caught for one off the leg-spinner Eddie Leadbeater, trying to force runs. Defending or attacking made no difference. He ‘jumped out to Mitchell’ at Chesterfield in June 1936, ‘changed his mind and gave the bowler a simple return’, the Derby Telegraph reported. In fairness, Sellers was far from alone; Yorkshire followed on that day. As with the world-beating Australian team around the year 2000, Sellers and other batsmen of Yorkshire’s lower order might