Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

86 Treachery in Australia 1946/47 Sellers had said some of it in the weeks before. He caused a sensation now, in the English and Australian press, for two reasons. One was timing, which is one of the ingredients of news. The nearer to the First Test, the more any comment mattered. Whether Sellers had a point or not, any warning by any Englishman, especially from one so ‘expert’, became a news story, before the actual cricket. Why did Sellers say it? By accepting the job, he had risked the charge of hypocrisy. That had not stopped the Post offering the job – naturally, because controversy sold newspapers. Had the prospect of a winter in Australia, and a seat at the much-anticipated Tests, turned Sellers’ head? Was he like Bill Bowes trying the life of a correspondent for size? To put the question another way; could the selectors have chosen another captain? Sellers, Robins and chairman of selectors A.J.Holmes, appointed in April 1946, had chosen Hammond for the Tests against the touring Indians. When Hammond captained England in June 1946 at Lord’s against the Rest, the other captain was Bryan Valentine. If Hammond had given up or been injured, other men were around; they always are. As Hammond was batting as well as ever, it would have taken brave selectors to overlook Hammond, and the veterans, the known and the obvious. To pick the tour party, three aged Lord’s grandees – Sir Stanley Jackson, Sir Pelham Warner and Lord Cobham – joined the selectors. They were plainly there to make sure the choices were unobjectionable to the sort of men they met in gentlemen’s clubs and even the House of Lords. As in cabinet government, one member may disagree with the majority, but he either has to accept the decisions or resign. Sellers, like any selector, owed loyalty. Cliff Cary, a journalist covering the tour, was convinced afterwards ‘that had Sellers possessed the power to alter the touring party, there would have been many radical changes long before the First Test’. Cary felt Sellers criticised Hammond, ‘so caustically’ to wake him up. Except: couldn’t Sellers have avoided the embarrassment of finding fault with the captain, who he helped to choose, by telling him in private? More to the point, did it work? Journalists asked Hammond to reply. He did, rather stiltedly: ‘Mr Sellers is on the same basis as any other journalist with the MCC party and is entitled to write as he pleases. No strained relations exist between us.’ The mass-market Daily Express on 27 November - always ready to keep stirring a pot - suggested the opposite; that there were ‘strained relations’. It reported that Sellers ‘was at one time discussed as a possible member of the touring team’; in other words, insinuating that Sellers might have wanted Hammond’s job. The next day the Express and others did report Sellers laughing and joking with Hammond and wishing him the best of luck. Even if it was genuine, couldn’t Hammond have done without the bother, on the eve of the first Test against Australia for eight years? In a 1959 memoir Bill Edrich, one of the 1946 tourists, wrote: ‘Cut Hammond and he bled like any other human being. And that is what happened here. He was deeply hurt and the morale of the team around him dropped.’ Edrich was one of the few to speak in terms of feelings; and even he implied that Sellers wrote what he did for