When a teenager, Rohan Kanhai upset Keith Miller in 1955; six years later, he bats for Western Australia against NSW at SCG 1961. This is an excerpt from Blasting from Runs. Keith Miller got a bit upset at the way a green 19-year-old was making a fool of the cricket manuals during the Aussies’ triumphant tour of the West Indies back in 1955. I was a relatively new boy on the British Guiana side that tackled the Aussies at Georgetown that day.
Keith Miller was bowling his big out-swingers, and I was clouting them regularly to the square-leg boundary. Nobody told me that I shouldn’t do it and that I was committing the batsman’s biggest sin by hitting against the ball. That was my favorite shot, and it brought me a heap of runs. Big burly bowler Keith Miller was completely flummoxed. He knew the answer to every trick in the book, but I wasn’t playing by the rules.
The madder he got, the more I innocently pulled him to the fence. At a party after the match, Keith Miller came up to me with a rueful grin, wagged an accusing finger, and said, “The next time you play a shot like that kid, you’ll be in trouble’. Perhaps I should have taken his warning, but I felt it was a pity to change when I was getting a few runs. And I haven’t changed, you know.
