Lawrence Somerville Martin Miller (31 March 1923 – 17 December 1996) was a

cricket Cricket is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of eleven players on a field at the centre of which is a pitch with a wicket at each end, each comprising two bails balanced on three stumps. The batting side scores runs by striki ...

er who played 13 matches of

Test cricket Test cricket is a form of first-class cricket played at international level between teams representing full member countries of the International Cricket Council (ICC). A match consists of four innings (two per team) and is scheduled to last fo ...

for

New Zealand New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 smaller islands. It is the sixth-largest island count ...

between 1953 and 1958, and played

Plunket Shield New Zealand has had a domestic first-class cricket championship since the 1906–07 season. Since the 2009–10 season it has been known by its original name of the Plunket Shield. History The Plunket Shield competition was instigated in Octob ...

cricket for

Central Districts The Central Stags, formerly known as Central Districts, are a first-class cricket team based in central New Zealand. They are the men's representative side of the Central Districts Cricket Association. They compete in the Plunket Shield firs ...

and

Wellington Wellington ( mi, Te Whanganui-a-Tara or ) is the capital city of New Zealand. It is located at the south-western tip of the North Island, between Cook Strait and the Remutaka Range. Wellington is the second-largest city in New Zealand by me ...

Cricket career

A tall left-handed batsman, Miller was a late developer who made his first class debut at 27 when Central Districts entered the Plunket Shield for the 1950–51 season. Batting in the middle order he top-scored in the first match with 46, and again in the second match with 64, when Central Districts had their first victory. He did not play in 1951–52, but returned in force in 1952–53: 103 not out against Wellington, 128 not out and 89 not out against Canterbury, 77 and 31 against Otago, and 43 against Auckland, amassing 471 runs at 157.00. He played in the two Tests later that season against South Africa, making 17, 13 and 44, and was selected to tour South Africa in 1953–54. He failed there though, making only 47 runs in four Tests including four successive ducks. In the Second Test at Johannesburg he was felled by a sharply rising ball from

Neil Adcock Neil Amwin Treharne Adcock (8 March 1931 – 6 January 2013) was a South African international cricketer who played in 26 Test matches. A tall aggressive fast bowler, he could lift the ball sharply off a length. He was the first South Afri ...

that struck him over the heart, and was taken to hospital. Although he was not expected to bat again in the innings, he returned to the crease straight from hospital at the fall of the fifth wicket and resisted the bowling for another half-hour. After the tour he found belated form in Australia on the way home, scoring 142 against South Australia and 60 against Victoria. Miller's highest Test score was 47 (followed by 25 in the second innings) when he opened the batting in a low-scoring game against

West Indies The West Indies is a subregion of North America, surrounded by the North Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea that includes 13 independent island countries and 18 dependencies and other territories in three major archipelagos: the Greater A ...

Auckland Auckland (pronounced ) ( mi, Tāmaki Makaurau) is a large metropolitan city in the North Island of New Zealand. The List of New Zealand urban areas by population, most populous urban area in the country and the List of cities in Oceania by po ...

in 1955–56, and New Zealand finally won a Test match after 26 years of trying. He had hit his highest first-class score earlier that season, 144 against Auckland, as well as scoring 114 for Wellington against the West Indians, having begun playing for Wellington the previous season. Although he played 13 Tests over five years, Miller made little impact, never passing 50 in an innings, and averaging less than 14 runs per innings. His Test career ended after the damp series in England in 1958, when he completed 1148 runs in first-class matches but again failed in the Tests. ''

Wisden ''Wisden Cricketers' Almanack'', or simply ''Wisden'', colloquially the Bible of Cricket, is a cricket reference book published annually in the United Kingdom. The description "bible of cricket" was first used in the 1930s by Alec Waugh in a ...

'' said that "at the age of 35, ecame too late on his first tour of England ... he knew how to punish the loose ball, but he was not happy against bowling of the highest class." Miller was one of the leading batsmen in the

in the 1950s: he scored 661 runs at an average of 66.10 for Central Districts, and 1708 runs at 47.44 for Wellington. He won the Redpath Cup for New Zealand batsman of the season in 1952–53, 1956–57 and 1957–58.

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Miller, Lawrie 1923 births 1996 deaths New Zealand cricketers New Zealand Test cricketers Central Districts cricketers Wellington cricketers Cricketers from New Plymouth North Island cricketers