Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

88 Treachery in Australia 1946/47 who accepted that umpires made mistakes like everyone else, and some would go for you, some against: ‘All sorts of things happen in cricket. That is what makes it worthwhile playing.’ He criticised English batsmen for not going down the wicket to spinners, and (repeatedly) told Doug Wright to bowl slower and give the ball more air. Unlike some journalists, who never admitted they were ever wrong, but who expected everyone on the field to be perfect, Sellers was frank about his shortcomings. When Wright bowled Bradman for 12 in the last Test, Sellers commented: ‘It was a bad shot – the sort of shot I play and one does not expect Bradman to do that sort of thing so early in his innings.’ Sellers, then, was rather a good correspondent. His son Andrew, 70 years on, said that reporting was ‘not really his forte, I would have thought; anyway he had a go at it, and he seemed to enjoy the trip a lot, very much so’. Informed and observant, Sellers gave criticism or credit when it was deserved and could show sympathy and wit. When Yardley bowled Bradman in the third Test, Sellers joked, ‘we shall have to call him the atom splitter’. Few brought up the November controversy afterwards; but they could still remember, and hold it against him. Sir Stanley Jackson at the time spoke of an ‘understanding’ that selectors would not write about players they picked until the end of a season; if so, Sellers evidently did not understand. Otherwise the MCC played the usual dead bat. The club secretary Lieutenant Colonel R.S.Rait Kerr said he had not seen the article and in any case would not comment: ‘Mr Sellers is in Australia purely as the correspondent of a newspaper and not in any capacity as a representative of the MCC.’ Could you take off responsibility and loyalty like a hat? Even in Hammond’s county, the Bristol Evening World thought you could. The newspaper had sounded sorrowful rather than angry: ‘it hardly seems cricket to launch such an attack’. Yardley in his memoir called the criticism ‘outspoken’ and recalled it ‘caused some dismay’. That might help us analyse the invitation to Sellers from the touring players to join their Saturday night club, ‘at which they and a few privileged friends throw off the cares of big cricket for a couple of hours’. The invite only came in January; had the players waited to see what else Sellers printed? Sellers like others praised Godfrey Evans’ wicket-keeping. Evans had already played under Sellers in wartime friendlies. In a memoir Evans admitted he did not know Sellers well but described him as ‘a man who said what he thought’ and a ‘great character under whom I should like to have played’. Edrich, however, in a memoir after he had safely retired from Middlesex, called Sellers’ criticism ‘inexcusable’. Significantly, Edrich objected on the principle: ‘I am not saying his opinions were wrong but he had no right to attack his captain while a match or series was in progress.’ Sellers’ offence was to betray the small, sensitive world of English cricket in public. According to Kilburn, the resentment puzzled Sellers, who had only said what he believed to be true. Sellers ‘undoubtedly suffered some loss of prestige’. Learie Constantine as a West Indian was free to speak his mind. Sellers had ‘rather blotted his copybook’, he wrote in his 1950 book Cricket Crackers : ‘ ... the whole thing should have been forgotten and Sellers could