Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

78 Wartime look back at 1939 was already ‘like peeping curiously through the wrong end of a telescope’. Hence whatever Wisden ’s verdict on Sellers – and the sketch naming him as one of the five hailed him as ‘the most successful county captain of all time’ – the fall of France and the Battle of Britain overshadowed it. The article also quoted Sellers’ opinion ‘that a clever bowler with ten good fieldsmen can shut out the game except when such batsmen as Bradman, Woolley, Leyland or Hammond take command. His contention is that such a bowler rather than the watchful batsman causes slow cricket.’ This made sense on that profound point of how to keep cricket watchable in an ever more demanding leisure market with ever more alternatives; however, the summer of 1940 was hardly the time for anything about cricket to stick in the public mind. Just as politicians well before the end of the war could debate the country after the war, so theMCC set up a ‘select committee’ under the distinguished former Yorkshire amateur Sir Stanley Jackson, to report on county cricket. It met on a Tuesday in December 1943 and January 1944 and reported in mid-March. Sellers was only one of eight amateurs and captains on the committee; the others were Hammond, the Nottinghamshire captain George Heane, A.J.Holmes of Sussex, E.R.T.Holmes of Surrey, Robins, Maurice Turnbull (to die in France in August) and Bob Wyatt. With so much in common, they were hardly going to disagree, nor demand drastic change; least of all Sellers, having done so well in the 1930s. It is however striking that – in contrast with parliamentary politics of the time, that saw such legislation as the 1944 Education Act – the MCC committee set itself against change. The committee saw nothing wrong with county cricket’s shape or style. It ended one 1939 experiment, of the eight-ball over, and proposed another, a new ball after 55 overs. It was against play on Sunday ‘for obvious reasons’, so obvious it didn’t say what – presumably, the law; it stood by matches of two innings, without time or overs limits on an innings, to give ‘the fullest scope for skilled captaincy to reap its reward’. It did suggest a knock-out competition, but of matches over three days. It was against merging any counties; or dividing the championship into two, ‘as this would appear to spell financial disaster for those in the lower half of the table’. It urged the county game to resume as soon as it could after the war, and suggested four ‘emergency’ regions: north, Midlands, south west and south east. In the event, the end of the war against Germany and then Japan in 1945 gave enough time to begin as normal in 1946. While you can never see the hand of anyone in such bland outcomes – indeed, committees pride themselves on being unanimous – it does show how Sellers, the ‘crackerjack’ captain, was fully in line with the conservatives in authority at Lord’s; whether in such empty slogans as ‘the players shall adopt a dynamic attitude towards the game’ or the more meaningful ‘the team shall aim for victory from the first ball and maintain an enterprising attitude until the last over’. That could have been Sellers’ motto. As an editorial in the Times summed up approvingly, the committee wanted to restore county cricket, as ‘more of a game and less of an organized business’. The champion county, whose challenge match in 1937 had been in aid of charities, was bound to agree.