Remembering Keith Miller - Flamboyance par excellence

Miller’s cricketing career was cut short by the Second World War in 1940 when he joined the army

The Australian team of the 1940’s, appropriately known as the Invincibles was overshadowed by the presence of unarguably the best Test batsman to ever grace the game - Sir Donald Bradman. However, a team is never made of one legend alone.

Among the other members of the side, Keith Miller is probably the most stylish, interesting and flamboyant of them all. So much so that he’d probably give Chris Gayle a run for his money.

Widely regarded as Australia’s greatest ever All-rounder, Miller was unsurprisingly a crowd favorite with a penchant for spectacular stuff and amazingly awesome looks. But what made him completely different from Bradman and probably many others from his era was his love for an even contest and despise for none.

In 1948, the year of the ‘Invincibles’, the Australians scored a World record 721 runs in a day against English county Essex. Miller, though, refused to be a part of the colossal score as he allowed himself to be bowled first ball after coming to bat with the score reading 2/364. "Thank God that's over", he said to the wicketkeeper before walking back to the pavilion much to the bemusement of all and sundry.

Akin to Shane Warne, Miller had an extremely sound cricket brain, but his attitude always worried the selectors. Ashley Mallet gives an example as to why - "He loved tradition, but hated convention. His unstructured way of playing and living would be anathema to cricketers now... He played as he fought the war, by impulse and mood."

He sometimes set his field by saying to his players: "scatter". On another occasion, he is reported turned to his players, after being told that NSW was taking the field with one player too many, and asked for one player to volunteer to "piss off".

The legends go on and on. Miller was always of the opinion that life existed beyond the cricketing field and cricket, at the end of the day, was just a game, much to the dissent of his captain Sir Don Bradman. His larger-than-life attitude and rebellious nature shaped his cricketing career and life beyond it.

Always one to require an even contest to bring the best out of himself, Miller lacked the ‘ruthless’ attitude that Bradman or Ponsford were garlanded with. Sid Barnes, his teammate, once remarked, “had the same outlook as Bradman or Ponsford he would have made colossal scores" and become "the statisticians' greatest customer".

A rather colorful character off the field, Miller was rumoured to have more than one mistress, one of them shockingly being Princess Margaret, daughter of Queen Elizabeth (I). His penchant for the spectacular wasn’t limited only to the cricketing field as he also courted an Australian Beauty Queen for a long time.

2 years before his death, he divorced his wife Peg to marry a long-standing mistress in 2002 at the ‘tender’ age of 83! With Miller, you could never know what was coming next.

English Journalist Ian Wooldridge summed it up beautifully, “He was more than a cricketer ... he embodied the idea that there was more to life than cricket".

On the cricketing field, however, when he was in the flow, he was a poetry in motion. When he retired from Test Cricket in 1956, he had the best statistics of any all-rounder in cricketing history, boasting of close to 3,000 runs at an average of 36.97 and 170 scalps at 22.97 in 55 Tests.

A cricketer way ahead of his age, Miller was also an astute fielder and had the safest pair of hands in the Australian side at slip. He had a cunning slower delivery and a vicious ‘faster one’ from a very small run-up in his armoury. His power hitting was as good as any of the current generation, it is said that he once hit the upper deck of the grandstand at the SCG when the ball was still travelling upwards.

Dusty was predominantly strong off the front foot and devastating with his power-hitting. He combined power-hitting with a plethora of unorthodox strokes like hitting sixes over square leg with something that looked like a backhand tennis shot. Fearless to the bud, he once started off days play with a towering six over long off.

Apart from a basket full of variations, Miller could move the ball both ways and made the ball rise sharply from a good length. Faster than his new-ball partner Lindwall, Miller never shied away from trying something new each game. At times, he would take a 5-pace run up and bowl with a straight arm, on other occasions he would take a longer run up and bowl much more round arm.

Compton felt that Miller "often had no preconceived idea what he intended to bowl even as he turned to start his run". He once castled English batsman David Sheppard with a well disguised googly in a Test match.

Legendary English opener Len Hutton believed Miller was the bowler who was least concerned with the position of his bowling mark and said that he "never felt physically safe against him.

On one occasion, the English crowd felt that he bowled one bouncer too many and started to boo him incessantly. Not one to be bothered a teeny bit, he simply sat down on the ground and waited until the booing subsided.

One really wonders whether he was born to play cricket in the wrong generation.

Miller’s cricketing career was cut short by the Second World War in 1940 when he joined the army. He was no different even then, being involved in various fist fights and tussles with higher authorities.

One of his more lively stories during the period of war was that after a battle with a German aircraft, he made an unauthorized trip to the city of Bonn because it was the birthplace of Beethoven.

A rather unfortunate event of his rather eventful career was that he never really got along with his captain and later national team selector Sir Donald Bradman. Among Miller’s countless tales, one was that he knocked on Bradman’s door late into the night telling him that he was in bed at curfew and was now going out.

After the invincibles tour, Miller played a testimonial match versus the Don in 1948-49. He bowled three consecutive bouncers to the Don, dismissing him on the last of those deliveries.

Following the game, Miller was promptly dropped a week later on the tour to South Africa. It was widely suggested that Bradman was responsible for the decision to not include him in the side. Even later, much later, when Bradman was a national selector, it is rumoured that he was the prime reason why Miller was never considered for captaincy.

Miller, however, never let the fame he earned on the field affect his personal life. John Arlott, the famous cricket broadcaster said, "that for all the glamour that attached to Miller, he was staunch and unaffected as a friend".

Miller’s life and times can be summed up by the following reply he gave to a reporter after taking 7 wickets for 12 runs against South Australia.

“There are three reasons, First, I bowled bloody well. Second, I, err ... second ..." [pause]. "You can forget about the other two reasons."