In 1956 a young science graduate fresh out of Cambridge was given a junior job on the sports desk at the Times. Two years later he made his own way on starvation rations to the football World Cup in Sweden. He reported some of the less enticing matches for his paper for six guineas a game.
By 2012, when David Miller’s career in regular sports journalism finally drew to a close, he had watched 25 Summer and Winter Olympic Games, 14 Fifa World Cups, 62 FA Cup finals, 450 England football internationals and 53 Wimbledon championships. In at least two of those fields – football and the Olympics – he was acknowledged as one of the world’s leading experts. Miller, who has died aged 91, was an unlikely sports reporter.
He looked and sounded more like a Conservative MP of the Macmillan era. Yet, unlike most of his neighbours in the press box, he had genuine athleticism: he won a football blue as a Cambridge winger in 1954 and 1955 and was not far from a place in the javelin at the 1956 Olympics. He also brought great qualities to the job.
Miller’s judgment of the sports he knew best was excellent. And he was a workaholic, much of his time being spent nurturing high-powered contacts over many years – from Stanley Matthews to Sebastian Coe. He also wrote more than 30 sport-related books, the last when was 87.
And on the big stories he could be stunning. On the night of the 1985 European Cup final between Liverpool and Juventus at Heysel Stadium in Brussels, when 39 spectators died in riots, he turned in a tour de force: front page, back page, sports page, thousands of words placing the whole story, including the match – which was played despite the carnage – in context in time for Times readers’ breakfasts. That was journalism of the highest class.
David was the son of Wilfred Miller, an actor, and Everilda (nee Milne-Redhead), and was educated at Charterhouse before going to Peterhouse, Cambridge. He did not last long on his relatively menial early job on the Times, but he met EW Swanton of the Telegraph, the leading cricket writer of the era, and even though cricket was far from Miller’s No 1 sport, Swanton recommended him to his sports editor. In his first year at the Telegraph, 1960, he clocked up 227 bylines – football in winter, tennis in summer – as opposed to zero on the Times whose writers were still anonymous.
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