Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

92 Last seasons 1946-48 most of the day, despite drizzle: ‘Look chaps,’ Wardle remembered Sellers saying. ‘there is a whole lot of spectators dying to see the Yorkshire side for the first time since before the war and it is up to us to carry on until the crowd goes home or the rain really pours down.’ The next month in the Roses match at Manchester, Kilburn in the Yorkshire Post estimated 36,500 were inside the ground, making the field of play ‘an island of green amid the surging tide of humanity’. Thousands could not get in, and outside ‘tried to judge the progress of the game by the applause’. Such was the public appetite for leisure, like a burst dam after war held back the natural flow for years. Sellers responded to it; except the men he used to turn to were not the same. In July 1945, for instance, Sellers led an Army team of all county players against the Royal Australian Air Force in a single innings match. The Times called it ‘one of the most disappointing games’ at Lord’s for a long time as the RAAF made 253 and bowled the Army for 70. Bowes, after near three years as a prisoner of war, ‘as could be expected, lacked his usual fire’, yet Sellers gave him 20 overs. Winning or losing in the 1945 season, the lull after the storm, did not matter so much. While playing for H.D.G.Leveson-Gower’s eleven at Scarborough, in the first festival for seven years, after the Australian Services made a remarkable 477 for eight on the first day, Sellers and Coxon, together at 187 for seven, added 53. Sellers hit Jack Pettiford for a six, then was caught off a mis-hit. The championship that mattered would begin again in 1946. The Times in its preview of the 1946 season summed up: ‘It will indeed be a fine performance by any county that finishes above Yorkshire.’ Such was Yorkshire’s reputation made in living memory. Yet county cricket The 1946 Yorkshire team in soccer kit, at Bradford Park Avenue. The grins of some suggest they saw the humour of being on an unfamiliar field of play; the distance in the centre between Norman Yardley and Len Hutton may speak of tension.