Yorkshire at 150: Sellers in lead role as club hits new heights

Sellers was arguably the second-most influential figure in the county’s history after Hawke, and, like his illustrious predecessor, was significant not because of his batting ability, which was modest, but because of events that unfolded first under his captaincy and then under his administration.

As captain, Sellers led Yorkshire to seven County Championships in the nine seasons before the Second World War and he also led them to the title in the first summer after the war.

Later, as Yorkshire’s cricket chairman, he presided over a run of seven Championships in 10 seasons between 1959 and 1968 only to then be responsible for dismantling the very empire which Hawke had created and which he himself had done much to enlarge.

Sellers was directly responsible for the departures of Brian Close and Raymond Illingworth, which marked the end of the county’s greatest years.

However, the two most successful periods of the club’s history, the 1930s and 1960s, occurred while he held positions of key responsibility, and it was for his leadership skills prior to the war that Sellers earned his place in Yorkshire affections.

When he effectively became Yorkshire captain in 1932, standing in for first-choice leader Frank Greenwood, who played only a handful of games that year due to business commitments, Yorkshire were on the cusp of unprecedented success.

They had won the title under Greenwood in 1931, their first Championship since the mid-1920s, when they had become the first county to win four in a row under Geoffrey Wilson and Arthur Lupton, yet it was not until Sellers took over that Yorkshire cricket truly hit the heights.

Although Sellers inherited a team of talents, it was his motivational ability, allied to his tactical nous, which moulded them into a dynamic force. A tall and strong right-handed batsman, with a pugilist’s complexion and no-nonsense demeanour, Sellers won over the players just as Hawke had done before him.

His father, Arthur Sellers, a former Yorkshire batsman, was chair of the club’s cricket committee at the time of his son’s elevation to the captaincy, but although nepotism may have played a part in his rise to the top job, Sellers junior was no silver-spoon amateur.

On the contrary, he was intimidating, courageous, loyal and earthy; he led with his heart on his sleeve and with his chest puffed out.

The nucleus of the 1920s side remained when Sellers took over – great players such as Percy Holmes, Herbert Sutcliffe, Maurice Leyland and George Macaulay.

But Wilfred Rhodes and Emmott Robinson had gone, leaving Yorkshire in need of a high-class left-arm spinner and quick bowler to help continue the cricketing dynasty.

Enter Hedley Verity and Bill Bowes, who spearheaded the attack throughout the 1930s to the extent that they took 2,378 of the 4,593 wickets taken by Yorkshire bowlers in the County Championship during that period.

Verity it was who coloured Sellers’s first season at the helm with the greatest bowling figures that cricket has known – 10-10 against Nottinghamshire at Headingley in July 1932. No sooner had Verity accepted his colleagues’ congratulations than Holmes and Sutcliffe registered an unbroken stand of 139 to set the seal on a 10-wicket victory.

A month earlier, Holmes and Sutcliffe had recorded the then highest opening partnership in history – 555 against Essex at Leyton, which eclipsed the 554 made by fellow Yorkshire openers Jack Brown and John Tunnicliffe against Derbyshire at Chesterfield in 1898.

Such record-breaking feats were common during Sellers’s time – and they revealed the awesome power of his Yorkshire team.

It was a team that always seemed to have someone capable of producing a match-winning display.

Sutcliffe was imperious, possibly the greatest English batsman of the day, while the decade also saw the emergence of another great Yorkshire opening batsman – Len Hutton.

Leyland, a stocky left-hander good enough to average 46 in Test cricket, was another cult figure, while the likes of Arthur Mitchell, Wilf Barber and Cyril Turner could always be relied on to score useful runs.

The great character of the Yorkshire side was Arthur Wood, a wicketkeeper nicknamed ‘Rhubarb’ or ‘Sawdust’, whom Bowes described as “one of the grandest little fat fellows you could ever wish to meet”.

Wood was the smiling face of a Yorkshire team that was not renowned for playing for fun and always ready with a quip or several. When he made his Test debut a few days short of his 40th birthday, against Australia at the Oval in 1938, a game in which Hutton made a record-breaking 364, Wood walked into bat at 770-6 and later reflected that he was “always a man for a crisis”.

Wood also coined one of the game’s most famous expressions; after Verity had been struck for 4,4,4,6,6,6 by the South African Jock Cameron at Bramall Lane, he joked: “You’ve got him in two minds, Hedley, he doesn’t know whether to hit you for four or six.”

Wood belied his generous build to effect 855 dismissals for the club and it was Yorkshire’s fielding, as much as their batting and bowling, that played a key part in their consistent success under Sellers. The captain ordered his players to stand a yard closer to the bat than other sides and intimidated batsmen with his aggressive presence and field settings.

JM Kilburn, the former Yorkshire Post cricket correspondent, summed up what it was like to watch Yorkshire under his captaincy.

“Yorkshire at full strength were an impressive team to watch,” he wrote. “They could exhibit most of the fascinating and spectacular aspects of cricket through individual qualities.

“Sutcliffe illustrated batting assurance, Leyland hit sixes; Bowes was an exciting fast bowler, Verity an artist in accuracy. Macaulay, bowling off-breaks, was antagonism personified and Wood could lighten moments of tension or periods of inconsequence with wicket-keeping acrobatics. Mitchell and Turner and Sellers stopped the breath with brave and creative catches.”

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