Sports Journalist David Miller Dies Aged 91

David Miller, the sports journalist who has died aged 91, covered 25 Olympic Games, 14 World Cups and 450 England internationals. By his retirement from regular reporting in 2012 he was counted among the world's leading experts on football and the Olympics.

The night of Heysel

On big stories, the obituary says, he could be stunning. The example it gives is the 1985 European Cup final in Brussels, Liverpool against Juventus at Heysel Stadium. Thirty-nine spectators died in riots, and the match was played anyway. Miller filed a front page, a back page and a sports page, thousands of words in all, placing the whole story in context in time for breakfast readers of the Times. The obituary calls it journalism of the highest class.

The tally of events is only part of the picture. He also wrote over 30 books on sport, the latest when he was 87, and spent years cultivating contacts from Stanley Matthews to Sebastian Coe. The columnist Pat Collins said: "He took football more seriously than anyone else."

An unlikely reporter with real athletic ability

Miller had the look and voice of a Conservative MP from the Macmillan years, which made him an odd fit for the press box. Yet as a Cambridge winger he earned a football blue in 1954 and 1955, and he came near to making the javelin event at the 1956 Olympics.

His start was modest. In 1956 he began as a junior on the Times sports desk. In 1958 he travelled to the World Cup in Sweden on a shoestring and filed reports on some of the duller matches for six guineas a game.

From the Telegraph to the Express and back

He did not stay long in that first job. At the Telegraph, EW Swanton, the foremost cricket writer of the era, put in a word with his own sports editor. In 1960, his first year there, Miller clocked up 227 bylines. The Times, whose writers were still anonymous, had given him none.

In 1973 he joined the Daily Express as chief sports writer, with a free rein. The paper was in freefall, though, and after ten years he took a pay cut and went back to the Times. His longtime sports editor there, Tom Clarke, said he understood how big-time sports people operated, and added that Miller was not pompous to work with.

Paradoxes, fast cars and a family

The obituary calls Miller a man of paradoxes: infuriating at times, very generous at others, especially to waiters. Colleagues recall frightening speed when he drove his Mercedes. In an Italian city he stopped at a red light, and a neighbouring driver admiringly said he drove like an Italian. Miller thanked him in Italian, then cut the man up the moment the lights changed.

He left the Times in 2007, retired to Norfolk and kept writing as a freelance. In 1957 Miller married Marita Malyon, who died in 2018. Their daughter, Michelle, died in 2024. He is survived by their son, Gavin.

Source: The Guardian