A “wee Champions League ball” is bouncing completely for Lennon Miller within the Aberdeen gamers’ front room.
Father Lee, then a striker on the Pittodrie membership, is blown away once more by means of the freakish methodology of his two-year-old son when he “completely lotions one” at the volley.
With the ball mid-flight, his astonishment right away turns to horror when the spouse of then Aberdeen supervisor Jimmy Calderwood swings open the door to the living room with a pitcher of wine in her hand.
Ruin. Splash. “She was once soaking,” Lee recollects. “All of us simply stopped and had been pondering, ‘how’s she going to react to this?’. However she simply laughed it off.”
On the identical age, the previous Scotland striker additionally recollects his younger son oddly having the data to dry the ball together with his most sensible earlier than taking a throw.
And by the point he was once 4, the Motherwell midfielder was once making an attempt corners on 11-a-side pitches, even supposing he “could not hit the 18-yard field”.
Remember that, soccer was once – and nonetheless is – younger Miller’s existence, however his international was once grew to become the wrong way up on the age of simply 5 following the lack of mom Donna, who died in 2012 after having most cancers.
Now 18, and already a talismanic determine at Fir Park, doing mum proud is what drives {the teenager}, who has been integrated in Steve Clarke’s Scotland squad for the impending International locations League play-off with Greece.
“Going via that at the sort of younger age, soccer has been my get away from the sort of devastating factor,” Miller tells BBC Scotland.
“I felt like each time I used to be in the home it was once catching up on me and each time I used to be out at the pitch I forgot about it.
“If I used to be disappointed I might at all times consider soccer, I might communicate to my dad about soccer. It was once simply my method of escaping it.”
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