Keith Miller's ode to a Mann out of time
Posted: Sat Oct 12, 2013 9:48 am
Cricket moments
Addressed to "My dear Mrs Tufty", and badly typed on Sporting Life writing paper, Miller negotiates his way awkwardly around what he wants to say. His grief - and guilt - is almost palpable.In the scrapbook Daphne Greenwood Mann kept after her husband Tufty's premature death, there is a letter from Keith Miller, the rakish Australian all-rounder. The two played against each other when Lindsay Hassett brought his 1949/50 Australian cricketers to South Africa and Miller wrote Mann's widow an emotionally cumbersome, strangely touching private obituary
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Norman "Tufty" Mann was a slow left-arm spinner with a touch of Dickensian miserliness about him. He played 19 Tests for South Africa after World War II, going to England in 1947 and 1951. His bowling was flat, careful and cunning, an impression accentuated by the fact that he wore small, round spectacles. He was never a great spinner of the ball, but was consistently difficult to get away. He probably initiated the tradition of holding finger-spinning South Africans, running through Hugh Tayfield to Nicky Boje and Paul Harris. He would have played more for South Africa, but died in 1952 aged 32.
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