Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

91 Chapter Nine Last seasons 1946-48 The few players left from the 1930s soon found that it was not easy for them to make close contact with the new generation of cricketers. JM Kilburn, Cricket Decade (1959) He was never short of words, even at Bristol on Tuesday 25 May 1948. Everything went wrong on that final day. It began with Yorkshire 302 ahead with nine wickets standing. Yorkshire wanted quick runs, to then declare; instead they lost seven wickets in the first hour for 43. Sellers batting at nine made 29 not out, and set Gloucestershire 389 in four and a half hours. Watson and Coxon dropped catches off Charles Barnett, who made 141. If catches win matches, dropped catches lose matches. Gloucestershire won by six wickets. George Baker of the Bristol Evening World reported: ‘I sat a yard away from Yorkshire bowler Bill Bowes in the press box and he made no audible comment.’ Sellers had to walk through the ‘admiring throng’ that welcomed the batsmen and then the fielders to the pavilion – because beating Yorkshire still mattered. A 19-year-old Tom Graveney had been waiting as next man in. Ten years later he recalled that Sellers stood in the doorway of Gloucestershire’s dressing room. ‘Well played, you lot,’ he said. ‘But I’ll ne’er declare against yer again.’ That defiance hid an admission; if Yorkshire’s bowling was so weak - without Verity and Bowes, or rather without young bowlers to replace them – and if the captain could no longer set a target, the county could never hope to win enough games to be champions. Yorkshire would have to build again; and did, under Yardley; the county tied with Middlesex for the Championship in 1949. That Yorkshire came seventh in 1947 and fourth in 1948 in Sellers’ last seasons – in 1948 Yardley was captain, and Sellers only stood in when Yardley was leading England against Australia – showed that Sellers could not win with any team. That might seem ammunition for the critics who said that his great side of the 1930s would have won under anyone. If so, how did Yorkshire become champions in 1946, when so many of the 1930s men had gone, or were shadows of themselves? That unusually level 1946 season, when every county was starting anew, showed the difference that Sellers made. In his 1941 sketch, Robertson-Glasgow had already seen Sellers as ‘probably, the one above all others to whom cricketers must look after the war to guide the first-class game along the lines of sense and enjoyment’. In July 1946, just before he made his first-class debut, Johnny Wardle was playing for the Yorkshire first team against Scotland in Glasgow, when Sellers lost the toss and Scotland batted. Sellers kept Yorkshire in the field