KEITH MILLER

Last Tuesday, I was a guest of the Professional Cricketers Association at New Road in Worcester at a lunch for former professional cricketers. A toast was drunk to Sir Garry Sobers, whose 89th birthday it was. I was sitting next to my old landlord, team-mate and roomie, Mike Taylor, who spent five years playing alongside the great man for Nottinghamshire before Mike left the Midlands to join us at Hampshire on the South Coast. Inevitably, the memories and stories about Sobers as a cricketer and as a person abounded. Mike said that he was the greatest all-round cricketer in the history of the game and the nods of agreement from the great and the good roundabout seemed to indicate that he had just expounded a truism as self-evident as that the earth is round. In the same way that Bradman is acknowledged without exception as the greatest batsman who ever lived, Sobers’ status as the greatest all-rounder is equally indisputable.

So, let me pose the question - who in the pantheon of great all-rounders is second on the list? In any discussion of notable all-rounders in the game, the following names crop up the most frequently: Jacques Kallis, Kapil Dev, Imran Khan, Ian Botham, Richard Hadlee and Andrew Flintoff. (It would not be right to examine Ben Stokes’s credentials; he is still playing – we hope!) Let me put aside the following for reasons thus stated: Flintoff (never a ‘great’, yet capable of great performances), Hadlee (a bowler who could bat), Kapil (likewise) and Kallis (a batsman but a reluctant bowler). That leaves Imran and Botham. Statistics alone do not tell the whole story but in this case, they provide compelling evidence.

Imran   88 Tests   Batting average 37.69   Wickets 362 @ 22.81

Botham   102 Tests   Batting average 33.54   Wickets 383 @ 28.40

Not a lot in it, though I guess Imran just shades it. He was also a successful captain, which Botham was not. Furthermore, he became prime minister of his country, which Botham has not, though he does currently sit in the House of Lords while Imran sits in a Pakistan gaol.

Then another name floated into my mind, a truly great all-rounder whose reputation by and large has flown below the radar. But not in Australia, where he is lauded with every justification as Australia’s greatest – Keith Miller. His name is forever associated with Ray Lindwall, a pair of fast bowlers that stand comparison with any pair in cricket history (think McDonald and Gregory, Larwood and Voce, Hall and Griffiths, Trueman and Statham, Adcock and Heine, Lillee and Thomson, Waqar and Wasim, any pair gleaned from a panoply of West Indian quicks , including Roberts, Holding, Garner, Croft, Marshall, Ambrose, Walsh et al, Donald and Pollock and even our recently-retired Anderson and Broad). Yet ignorance of Miller’s batting feats would do him a grave disservice. It is often overlooked what a magnificent batsman he was as well. Let us consider first the bald figures of his career. 55 Tests, batting average 36.97, wickets 170 @ 22.67. That tops the list in my view, Sobers excepted.

Miller on the square cut. Note the perfect balance of body and head and although he is playing off the back foot, his weight is leaning forward, ensuring he is on top of the ball at the moment of contact. This is a beautiful picture. No wonder the Australian prime minister, Sir Robert Menzies, gave it pride of place on his desk.

People forget what a glamorous and charismatic figure Miller cut in the immediate post-War years, whose magnetism transcended the world of cricket in the same way that possibly only Imran and Shane Warne have matched in recent years. For a start, he was impossibly good looking, who, according to his great friend and implacable opponent, Denis Compton, had women throwing their handbags at him. Compton, incidentally, had to duck a few handbags in his time, so it is alleged. Like Compton, Miller had his early cricket career curtailed by the Second World War, in which he served with distinction, flying Mosquito fighter-bombers, surviving several near-death events. Famously, when a guest on Michael Parkinson’s chat show, and asked how he dealt with the pressure of Test match cricket, he responded. “Pressure! What pressure? Pressure is when you have a Messerschmidt up your arse!”

Miller bowling in the third Test of England’s tour of Australia 1954-55

A rebellious streak in his temperament led to frequent brushes with military authority but he always seemed to avoid serious repercussions because his commanding officers invariably were cricket enthusiasts and needed him to play in Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) representative matches. In common with other cricketing veterans of war – the other most notable being Bill Edrich, another hell-raiser – exposure to danger in battle led to a devil-may-care attitude to his cricket career, one that espoused love of the contest rather than a preoccupation with the result. He was a fierce but generous competitor, who enjoyed nothing more than a night on the tiles after a hard day in the field.

Miller of Australia batting. Billy Griffith of Sussex behind the stumps.

As a batsman, he was good enough to bat at No. 3 in the Australian Test team but more often batted in the middle-order because at the time (1946-56), Australia had a succession of excellent batsmen. Besides, his captains, Don Bradman and Lindsay Hassett, preferred to utilise him, together with Lindwall, as the spearhead of their opening bowling attack. Capable of express pace off a five-stride run-up and slow spinners off his usual lengthy approach – he was that much of a maverick with the ball in his hand as he was at the controls of his Mosquito – he bowled some coruscating spells and always seemed to take wickets when they were most needed. Easy wickets and easy runs never appealed to him. Nor was he remotely concerned about averages and personal performances; it was the thrill of the combat that rocked his boat. Evidence of this happy-go-lucky temperament is always cited in a match against Essex during the Invincibles Tour of England in 1948, captained by Bradman. The Australians had rattled up a record score of 721 in a single day against a mediocre Essex bowling attack. When Miller came in to bat, he stepped away at the first ball he faced to be bowled, so little interest had he in the unequal contest. “Thank God, that’s all over,” he muttered to the bowler, Trevor Bailey, on his way back to the pavilion.

Miller is one of only three cricketers who have their name on the honours board in the away dressing room at Lord’s for having taken a five-wicket haul and scored a century.

He featured as much in the gossip columns of the dailies as he did in the sports pages. Even after retirement, his social contacts and engagements, at race meetings, ballrooms, press boxes, dress circles and fancy restaurants meant that he was rarely out of the public eye. It was rumoured he had an affair with Princess Margaret, and he formed an unlikely friendship with Sir Paul Getty. His photograph had pride of place on the desk of Sir Robert Menzies, the Australian prime minister.

Neville Cardus, the doyen of cricket writers, said of Miller, “The Australian in excelsis”. Few disagreed. The MCC commissioned a portrait of him to hang on the walls of the Lord’s pavilion, only one of five Australians so honoured, the others being Victor Trumper, Don Bradman and latterly, after Miller’s death, Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath.

Oh, and by the way, he was a magnificent slip fielder and a successful Aussie Rules footballer. His nickname was ‘Nugget’, on account of the comment by the journalist Ian Wooldridge, who tagged him, “The Golden Boy of Australian Cricket”. A true guide to his greatness as a cricketer is that in the estimation of every captain of teams who lost to Australia in their unbeaten run in the post-War years, the results would probably have gone the other way if Miller had been on the opposite side.

Last word should probably go to one of those captains, Len Hutton: “He could bowl anything from a slow wrong-‘un to a searing bouncer first ball, making him a formidable and unpredictable opponent. He was undoubtedly the greatest bowler I ever faced in Test cricket… Oh, aye, ‘e could bat too!”

Hutton has his off stump removed by a delivery from Miller.