Miller versus Keegan

Geoff Miller’s appointment as national selector is, according to Mike Atherton in today’s Sunday Telegraph, a good choice. “He knows the game,” Atherton said, “having played it at the highest level; he is not so big a name that he will become a distraction, and, in my dealings with him, he has shown the right mix of honesty, straightforwardness and discretion.” However, the difference between the announcement of England’s new chief selector, and Kevin Keegan’s return to St James’ Park, could not be greater:

There was no clearer demonstration of the divergent paths that cricket and football have taken these last two decades than on Friday afternoon. At St James' Park, amidst a whirligig of cameras and flashing lights and before a throng of reporters, Newcastle welcomed Kevin Keegan back from exile. At a desolate-looking Lord's, meanwhile, five cameras (one hand-held) and a dozen scribes sat at the feet of Geoff Miller, England's new chairman of selectors, now the so-called national selector. Even the biscuits, kindly laid on, were barely touched.

It is interesting to speculate, had such twin events occurred on a wintry Friday afternoon 20 years ago, what the relative glitz factor might have been. Maybe Newcastle would still have been the more powerful magnet. But the satellite-induced football revolution had barely begun, England's cricketers held the Ashes and cricket could boast the biggest name in English sport in Ian Botham. The contrast would not have been so acute.

He adds a cautionary note to the ECB’s communications department, too. “The relative lack of media interest in Miller's ascension could also have been because notice of the press conference was not given until two hours beforehand (memo to the communications department: not everyone can afford to live within an hour of London).”