Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

5 Chapter One Oxford, May 1932 Strolling along the banks of Isis and Cherwell on a summer afternoon, watching the white-clad figures of young athletes playing cricket on the lawns of the University Parks, or the punts proceeding at a leisurely pace along the Thames, one comes closer to the peculiar idea of an English Arcadia, to the English conception of happiness. ZA Grabowski, Your Undiscovered Island (1950) The newspapers agreed that the match between Yorkshire and Oxford University was nothing out of the ordinary. The newspapers were wrong. They did not report anything wrongly; rather, as so often, they missed the most important event, that would define Yorkshire county cricket for the next five decades. It happened out of sight, on the second day, Thursday 5 May. Ever since a storm had broken over Oxford and district on the previous Sunday afternoon, that flooded some roads, it had been no weather for cricket. Fred Harvey, The Parks groundsman, was able to remove some of the water from the pitch on the Tuesday evening, and it did not rain on Wednesday; even so, play only began at 3.40 pm. The new captain of Yorkshire, Brian Sellers, won the toss, and chose to bat. The famous opening pair of Percy Holmes and Herbert Sutcliffe had to watch the ball that sometimes ‘kicked’. Yorkshire closed the day on 170 for three. In some years, when the county traditionally began its season there, batsmen could walk to the middle in shirt sleeves. In 1936 the anonymous Bradford Telegraph and Argus reporter said: ‘Every time I come to this lovely park ground I am amazed at the number of shades of green …. in the trees which surround it …. Flowers, sunshine and soft spring breezes too all help to make a perfect setting.’ It did not feel like that in 1932, under grey skies, in the keen north-east wind – from Yorkshire, indeed. The Cricketer magazine’s Oxford correspondent, Isis, called it ‘the coldest day upon which the writer remembers ever to have watched a cricket match’. On that second, brighter, day, ‘Sellars’ – so mistyped by the Oxford Mail – went in to bat next after Holmes was out for 110. Alan Melville the Varsity captain had just brought on his leg spinner, Tuppy Owen-Smith, ‘and the Yorkshire captain did not shape at all well at his first over’, the Oxford Mail reported. However, Sellers got going, and Melville brought himself on instead of Owen-Smith. ‘The Keighley amateur,’ said the Yorkshire Evening News , meaning Sellers, ‘made good use of the full drive and this stroke