A few weeks ago my article on Oleksiy Mykhaylychenko (Alexei Mikhailichenko) was published on here but I did say that I’d be writing another article on my admiration for Charlie Miller. So here it is!
Charlie Miller (much as with the aforementioned Miko) is one of those names that tend to elicit a mixed response from Rangers fans. That mixture depends on whether you view him as someone who lived a dream or who blew a dream. Let me put it this way, he played around 100 matches more for Rangers than I ever will, so he gets the benefit of the doubt from me.
Another thing that might make my admiration of him seem strange is that he’s only actually around 4 years older than me. Yet to me, he was a name I looked up to from when I was around 10 years old. How so? Because one of the staff (Robert Kelly) in my parents’ shop used to bring me in his copies of the Rangers News once he’d read them. This was back in the days when it was actually in a newspaper format rather than magazine-style.
There used to be reports from the Rangers kids teams in it and I read them as avidly as any other part of it. Every week, the same name was cropping up. Charlie Miller. “Man of the Match, Charlie Miller”, “goalscorer Charlie Miller”, “…through a free-kick from Charlie Miller”, “…after a dribble from Charlie Miller”.
Basically, I followed Charlie Miller’s progress from around the U14s into the youth team, then into the reserves and until he was making his first team debut aged 17 (initially as a striker before dropping back to the midfield role in which he would make far more impact).
In 1994 (could have been ’95…) I travelled through to Glasgow with my folks for an Old Firm match (I went with my Dad but my mum came along for the mini-hols). In those days, before Old Firm matches, the Rangers team would stay at what was then the Moat House hotel, just over the Clyde from Ibrox. We were staying there too.
Having the Rangers team just floating about the hotel was surreal. I ran across the foyer to get an autograph from an initially slightly alarmed Brian Laudrup. This was the night before. The morning of the game is when Charlie Miller sealed his iconic status with me. My mum, despite knowing nothing about football, was able to surmise that the guy with a baseball cap yanked low down over his face at breakfast was probably a footballer attempting to avoid attention. She’d picked out Basile Boli. Despite his desire to keep a low profile, the French international gave me his autograph. Then he headed off.
I saw Charlie Miller and Neil Murray and grabbed autographs from them too. Boli, having just given me his autograph moments earlier, kept walking. Charlie Miller hadn’t seen that earlier signing take place and wrongly assumed that Basile Boli was blanking me, so the 18 year-old Prince of Castlemilk shouted at the Champions League winner to come back and give me an autograph. I explained that he already had (so that Charlie didn’t think that Basile Boli was just being a d*ck).
Basically, there are a lot of things that can go wrong when you meet your heroes, but things going right can become a weirdly treasured memory. The kid I’d read about from U14s up had just bawled out one of the most famous and fearsome defenders in world football (honestly, at that stage he was – that he was going to be so dreadful in Scottish football wasn’t fully appreciated at that point).
Anyway, back to the football. Charlie looked like he could do no wrong in the early days of his career. The comparison that was frequently made was between him and Barcelona’s Ivan de la Pena. Both were the playmakers at the heart of their national U21 teams and were seen as stick-ons to make huge impacts at their club sides. Both would go on to suffer something of a wobble in career trajectory though. Then again, de la Pena would go on to win the Europa League with Espanyol.
Incidentally, there is another noteworthy European midfielder who Miller is sometimes mentioned alongside. When David Beckham scored from his own half versus Wimbledon’s Scotland goalie Neil Sullivan in 1996, he was wearing a pair of boots intended for Miller. The boot company had mixed up the supply and the ‘Spice Boy’ was wearing books with the name ‘CHARLIE’ stitched into them.
In 1995, at the age of 19, had won Miller won the SPFA’s Young Player of the Year award. It looked like only a matter of time before he would make his full international debut. It was a matter of time. Unfortunately, that time would be another 6 years, with spells at Leicester City (loan) and Watford in between before he arrived at Tannadice to experience a career renaissance under Alex Smith.
So what happened in between? Well, I do remember his progress being disrupted by shin splints, but the real issue was probably more in relation to his off-field company and refueling habits. The arrival of Gazza at Ibrox could be looked back on as something of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the UK’s most talented midfielder pronounced himself a Charlie Miller fan – which must have been an inspiring moment.
On the other hand, an evening out with Jimmy Five Bellies, Gazza and more of the Rangers players led to a court case that cast something of a pall over Miller’s Rangers days. Despite being acquitted of the assault charge that followed this night out and a charge of Breach of the Peace being found not proven, it’s something that people still call to mind.
Then again, the other thing people call to mind is Miller’s role in the victory that sealed Rangers’ nine-in-a-row title triumph. Charlie Miller putting in a left-footed cross for a bullet header from Brian Laudrup will forever remain a surreally beautiful moment.
When Dick Advocaat became Rangers boss it initially looked like a chance for Miller to make a fresh start. In Advocaat’s early matches he was basically the 12th man, coming off the bench to make an impact with goals and assists. Unfortunately, it gradually became apparent that he wasn’t going to be given the chance he craved. A loan spell at Martin O’Neill’s Leicester City followed but didn’t lead to a permanent deal.
Miller returned to Ibrox expecting to start over again. Instead he received a letter from David Murray informing him that he was no longer considered part of the first team squad and would be training with the reserves.
Graham Taylor’s Watford came calling and Charlie was off to England again. When I was working on the BBC1 Scotland show, Offside, Graham Taylor was a guest and I was to go and meet him at his hotel and escort him along to the studio. Along the way we were chatting about football and I said that he’d actually managed one of my favourite players… but I didn’t think that things had worked out too well. He had nothing bad to say about Charlie. Then again, I had opened by describing him as one of my favourite players.
For whatever reason, Miller was unable to show his full potential at Vicarage Road and was soon back in Scotland, signing for Alex Smith’s Dundee United. It was here that he finally seemed to find a manager prepared to trust him. Miller established himself as the heartbeat of that United side (even if Craig Easton in an earlier interview for the site did point out that he had to do all his running for him!).
His form led to what would turn out to be his one and only Scotland cap, versus Poland. Craig Brown handed out debuts to 7 players in the 1-1 draw with the Poles. Andy McLaren and John O’Neil also earned their only ever appearances in the dark blue.
There were frequent calls for Berti Vogts to call up the born-again playmaker but another cap never came. Given the players who Vogts did call up, it seems incredible that Miller wasn’t deemed worthy. This was in an era when I saw Scotland play New Zealand at Tynecastle and the Tartan Army footsoldier in front of me had No.9 on his jersey, with the name emblazoned as “Don’t Know” – in tribute to Vogts’s habit of calling up all and sundry. Effectively, there was a difference in philosophy. Vogts thought Miller wasn’t fit enough, Miller thought that he was better fat than those other players were fit. I tend to think he had a point.
It was while starring for United that Charlie had a fairly traumatic return to Ibrox. I was at the match and from my angle it looked like Fernando Ricksen just missed making contact with him but Miller tumbled to the ground and the red card was produced. The ground was stunned, I was shocked and felt my world shake. The next time he touched the ball there was a boo. I’m ashamed to say that I joined it. Huge apologies, Charlie.
I got home, saw the replay and Ricksen had, of course, ensured that his studs made contact with Charlie’s knee. Looking back on it, I still can’t believe I was stupid enough to believe that anyone would ever have to feign a foul with Fernando Ricksen in close proximity to them.
I remember reading that he’d wept in the players lounge after the game because of the booing and I still feel sick to have been anything to do with the cause of that.
If you had to pick a Scottish player who you’d assume wouldn’t travel well in general and definitely wouldn’t be in a rush to head somewhere that it was £8 a pint, then Charlie would have seemed a solid choice. Yet, amazingly, after Tannadice he was off to Norway to join Brann Bergen. I certainly wasn’t going to have bought a Dundee United top during his days that but Norway was far enough not to present any conflict of loyalties, so during his days there (courtesy of some online club shop translation assistance from a Norwegian ex) I did manage to buy their away shirt complete with his squad number.
He went on to become a huge fan favourite over there and achieved enough general celebrity to be featured in a Norwegian version of Punk’d or Beadle’s About – depending on your age and frame of reference.
20 goals in 65 matches for Bergen was a pretty good return for a midfielder but, unfortunately, after 3 seasons with the club his relationship with the coach led to him moving on. Miller desired a central midfield role, rather than the right-sided slot that he was usually being played in.
From there, he moved on to Lierse. He couldn’t keep the club up but did agree to stay on to try to get them promoted. Two slight problems were that he wasn’t made aware that Kaiserslautern had come in for him… or that his Belgian tax rate was about to go from 18% to 50%. Though as the man himself sums things up in his autobiography, “maybe the club’s biggest mistake was putting me into a hotel next door to a pub”.
Soon, he was on the move again… and this time there was a change of continent involved. Signing for Brisbane Roar and joining up with his old Ibrox teammate Craig Moore led to him being named the A-League’s Foreign Player of the Year in 2009.
These days, he’s back in Scotland and works with Viola FC, who I briefly did some social media work with a while back. Sadly, our paths didn’t cross. I also had a go many years ago at getting him on as a guest on a Radio Scotland show I was working on but the request never got anywhere.
So what’s the real story with Charlie Miller? A wasted talent?
Well, he was Scotland’s Young Player of the Year, he’ll forever be associated with Rangers sealing nine-in-a-row, he was admired at Dundee Utd, loved at Bergen and shone in Australia’s A-League.
I’d settle for that. Wouldn’t you?
Among other TV and radio credits, his football-savvy has meant roles as writer/script-editor on Offside and Only An Excuse (both BBC1 Scotland).
He set up ScottishComedyFC.com in 2011, hosts and produces the Scottish Comedy FC Podcast and is often the fingers behind the tweets on @ScotComFC.
These days, his content-creative and social media skills have led to him working as a content marketing specialist with a top Edinburgh agency. He remains in demand as a comedy writer and this year has been commissioned to write on the BBC Radio Scotland shows ‘The Good, The Bad and The Unexpected’, ‘The Fame Game’ and ‘Breaking The News’.
