South African cricketer David Miller holds the record for playing the most international cricket matches without featuring in a Test match.
Miller has played more international cricket than anyone who has never played in a Test match.
The left-handed player has played in 274 internationals with a white ball. West Indian Keiron Pollard, who is now retired, is the player with the most runs in a non-Test match. He has 224 runs.
“I would have loved to play a Test, but it is what it is,” says Miller, 34.
“I’ve achieved quite a lot in my white-ball stuff and I’m grateful to have played so many games.”
Miller has a good first-class record. In 63 games, he has averaged 36.32 and scored six centuries. He has also been a great fielder.
But it was a good time for South African Test batsmen like Jacques Kallis, Hashim Amla, AB de Villiers, and Faf du Plessis, and white-ball cricket was becoming more popular and more profitable.
In 2018, when he was about to turn 30, he gave up playing first-class cricket.
“I wasn’t being picked, even for the South Africa A side. There were guys ahead of me so I decided to concentrate on the white-ball stuff.”
He is wanted by franchises all over the world and has played for 22 different representative teams. In South Africa, fans wave banners that say “Killer Miller” and “It’s Miller Time” when he plays.
He is one of only four players who have scored more than 3,000 runs in one-day internationals with an average above 40 and a strike rate above 100. The other three are Jos Buttler and Jonny Bairstow, both of England, and De Villiers.
He is known for hitting big sixes, and he has cleared all three grandstands on different sides of his home ground at Kingsmead in Durban.
Recently, against Australia at the Wanderers Stadium in Johannesburg, he hit a ball out of the ground.
After an Indian Premier League game, he said something that is often used as a quote: “If it’s in the arc it’s out (of) the park, if it’s in the vee it’s in the tree.”
“That came from my dad,” he says.
Andrew Miller was a good club cricket player who played for Natal Country Districts.
Not everything is a big hit, though.
Miller will probably have to rebuild an innings at the World Cup, since he bats sixth and his team doesn’t have any established all-rounders.
“It’s about summing up the situation. Sometimes you are batting with the lower order and you have to decide with your partner at the time how you are going to go about it.
“It’s like a chess game at times. You are thinking about moves and what’s important and what’s not. It’s about making clear decisions. It helps your execution when you are fully committed.”
Miller showed both sides of himself when South Africa had to beat Australia in the last three games of a home series after losing the first two.
In the fourth game, he hit an unbeaten 82 runs off 45 balls, and he and Heinrich Klaasen, who was on fire, added 222 runs off 94 balls for the fifth wicket, which is hard to believe.
In the final game, which was harder, he played more carefully and scored 63 runs off 65 balls to help South Africa get to a score they could defend.
“The World Cup is very open,” he says. “We’re a pretty experienced team. We’re capable of doing it, so it’s a matter of getting the basics right for longer periods of time.”
Photo by Samuel Shivambu/BackpagePix
