Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

7 day, dawned with frost on the grass and ice on standing water. Yorkshire set Oxford 282; the students folded for 119. Sellers gave the longest bowls to the other two colts on debut, Frank Smailes and Arthur Rhodes. The reporters had more to say about them (Smailes took five wickets in the second innings; Rhodes was no relation to Wilfred) than the new captain, whether because Sellers did less, or it did not do to judge the county captain; or, they saw Sellers as simply the latest amateur – the seventh since the 1914-18 war - passing through as captain for a season or two. If they ever heard of the confrontation, first in the middle (that strange place, at the same time in public view and out of earshot) and then in the dressing room, they never reported it. R.C.Robertson-Glasgow once hinted at it, or – as impressive – guessed it. ‘But his first victory, which did not receive the notice of print, was the greatest, the showing that he was to be captain in fact as well as in name,’ ‘Crusoe’ wrote in a sketch published in 1941. ‘The medicine was bitter to some; they swallowed it, and felt better. He stood no nonsense, and was liked.’ Rain ruined Yorkshire’s next two matches, against MCC, and Cambridge University. At Lord’s Sellers was out again to a slow bowler – bowled by Jack Hearne for five. The London Evening Standard reckoned he ‘stayed long enough to enable critics to form a favourable impression of his style’. Even if he did impress, Yorkshire did not make Sellers captain for his Oxford, May 1932 An intriguing 1932, presumably pre-season, team picture beside the bowling green at Headingley. Standing(l to r): Arthur Wood, Frank Dennis, Arthur Rhodes, Bill Bowes, Hedley Verity, Arthur Mitchell, Wilf Barber, William Ringrose (Scorer). Seated: George Macauley, Percy Holmes, Brian Sellers, Frank Greenwood, Herbert Sutcliffe, Maurice Leyland. Judging by his rather cramped body – compared with Greenwood’s – the cravat-wearing Sellers looks a man not yet settled on his image as a Yorkshire captain, not at ease among those men, despite his county blazer. No wonder, if he had yet to take the field for the first team!?