David Miller hits a cricket ball as cleanly as anyone I have seen. Last Sunday at the Wanderers was another reminder: 142 off 93 balls and South Africa winning the series with a game to spare. For a man without a national contract, it was something of a statement ahead of next year's World Cup.
It was also the sort of innings that leaves you wondering why we haven't seen more like it - and not necessarily hundreds either. Sometimes the innings that tells you most about a batter is the ugly 50 not out when wickets are falling in tricky conditions and somebody has to carry the side through. Miller has gone through periods where runs and impact have been few and far between, but he has always been around, and when available, he is a must-have. But based on what exactly?
To understand it, you have to consider a key choice he made.
A career in red-ball cricket is a form of persecution because you build your technique around surviving the ball you don't want. You know the short ball is coming, you know the new ball may move, and if you survive the first innings, you may have to do it all again on a fifth-day pitch that's unpredictable. This kind of examination exposes the best and worst of your game.
If you are good, and fortunate enough, you finish with a decent Test average, some great memories, and perhaps something in the bank to help kick off the beginnings of a second career. Miller left red-ball cricket early in his career. It was a wise move; he saw the opportunity to enjoy cricket in a much easier way, and short-ball-free.
Franchise cricket had come along: contracts in different currencies, shorter tournaments, managed workloads, and practice built around hitting half-volleys and length balls for six. I accept it requires skill, and I would never suggest otherwise, but it's also increasingly a career built around making the most of the balls you want to face rather than learning how to survive the ones you don't. And it pays well enough to not bother much about a second career once retired from the game.
The gap in hardship between Test cricket and the franchise circuit has arguably never been wider, yet the money runs overwhelmingly in the opposite direction. Miller was one of South Africa's first major beneficiaries of the new world. Dewald Brevis may well follow. Glenn Maxwell managed the switch brilliantly. And then there is Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, who could conceivably become enormously wealthy before ever discovering what a fifth-day pitch does to your technique and your head.
Good luck to them. The game changed and they were smart enough to change with it.
My issue with Miller was not that he chose white-ball cricket, it's to do with where he chose to stand within it. In what will probably be his final year of international cricket, he now needs to step out of the shadows.
For most of his career he has batted at six. At that position you are seldom being asked to build the innings in the first half of the match or do the hard yards in the middle overs, keep partnerships going at a run a ball, keep wickets in hand before the launch starts. More often you are arriving late, with the platform already there or the game already in trouble, and your job either way is to attack what remains. Attack is the best form of defence, it's often said, and Miller, like a good few others, has made a handsome living this way. But where's the pressure in this?
Which brings me to the modern fascination with the "finisher", a role I have always thought is oversold. It's a tag that has been attached to Miller for long. The beauty to it is that it's a remarkably forgiving role. A finisher can fail four times out of six and still be described as dangerous, while a Test opener who fails four times knows he could be gone soon. One lives under permanent examination; the other often lives on reputation and the memory of what he can do when the conditions suit him.
Barbados was Miller's ultimate finisher-moment confirmation. The 2024 T20 World Cup final. South Africa needed 30 from 30 balls with Heinrich Klaasen and Miller at the crease, two of the best strikers of the ball in world cricket, and six wickets in hand. You could hardly have asked for a better, easier situation if this idea of the finisher was going to justify itself.
Klaasen went. Miller followed after sticking around for a while longer, and South Africa pulled off their greatest choke ever. If talent alone was ever going to be enough, that was the afternoon, but it wasn't, because talent has the unfortunate habit of letting you down when you need it most.
This final part of Miller's international career interests me more than what has gone before. I have known Shukri Conrad since we were 13 and I cannot imagine him wanting Miller to drift through another World Cup waiting for the perfect moment to arrive or trying to win the game from far back, with only one way to play. I can say with confidence, No. 5 will be the most important position for all teams in next year's World Cup in South Africa, and Miller should own it.
The irony is that some of his finest innings have come when he has been pushed higher and given more responsibility. The partnership with JP Duminy at the 2015 World Cup where both made hundreds, the hundred in the 2023 semi-final in Kolkata, and now the Wanderers match, where he came in at three down and had to shape the innings rather than merely finish it.
Batting at five is different because you can arrive when the innings is still deciding what it wants to become. You may have to absorb pressure, rebuild, deal with the short ball, negotiate a difficult spell, and then accelerate later. Sometimes the job is ugly and sometimes it's thankless, but there is no escaping responsibility.
For Miller, he and Conrad must toss the finisher label. Walk in earlier, take on the difficult overs and face the match-ups in the first half of the game, not the second. Give the innings shape while the game is still open, because that's where the best players leave their mark. And when it goes wrong, the blame is yours.
In conclusion, for all Miller's longevity, talent and franchise success, there is still one question remaining.
Which major tournament belongs to David Miller? There isn't one yet, and for a player that gifted, it should bother him - as I am sure it does. If South Africa win the World Cup with Miller doing things exactly his way, I will gladly say I got him wrong. But if not, I may look back on his career with the thought I still have now: 16 years, millions of dollars, extraordinary talent, and remarkably few scars. It is not necessarily a criticism but Miller's is among the greatest heists the game has ever seen.