When David Miller made his international debut in May 2010, Tristan Stubbs was just nine years old. Back then, Stubbs admired stars like Graeme Smith, AB de Villiers and Hashim Amla. But as he grew through school cricket and started batting towards the end of innings, it was Miller who became his biggest inspiration.
Now, Stubbs finds himself sharing the international dressing room, and crucially, the crease, with his childhood hero.
"I love batting with Dave [Miller]. I pretty much watched him my whole junior years and tried to mould my game around Dave and the way he plays the backend," Stubbs said in Ahmedabad, where South Africa are preparing for their second Super Eight game against West Indies as per a report of ESPN CricInfo.
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Against India, the pair added 35 runs in 21 balls to keep up the momentum after Dewald Brevis was dismissed. When Miller fell in the 16th over, Stubbs was on 17 off 11. He then accelerated smartly to remain unbeaten on 44 off 24.
"You can't just try and go too early, then you all blow out. It was about managing the situation," Stubbs said. "We still had a lot of time. Five overs in a T20 game is a lot of balls and can make a big difference."
At the post-match press conference, Miller described Stubbs’ knock as "massive in the context of things", hinting at a possible passing of the baton. At 36, Miller may be nearing his final T20 World Cup, while 25-year-old Stubbs looks ready to take over the finisher’s role.
Shared approach to finishing
Stubbs believes their success comes from thinking similarly about the game.
"We think so much alike about the game, about our role, which is pretty much similar. I have chewed his ear off over the years and I love the way he goes about it," Stubbs said. "We speak a lot about batsmanship, which sometimes can get lost. Everyone wants you to hit from ball one, and you can lose the value of your wicket, whereas myself and Dave, we think alike, so it's been awesome over the years to learn from that."
Stubbs added that understanding match situations is key. "If you need to go from ball one and the game's telling you to do that, it's pretty simple, you just try and hit from ball one," he said. "Often the game tells you what you need to do."
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So far, Stubbs and Miller have batted together 12 times, scoring 441 runs with four fifty-plus partnerships. In this tournament alone, they have put together stands of 75 off 39 against Canada, another against Afghanistan, and 35 off 21 against India: a total of 114 runs at a run rate of 11.21.
With Brevis adding strength to the middle order and all-rounders Marco Jansen and Corbin Bosch extending the batting till No. 8, South Africa’s line-up looks settled.
"It sounds weird, but it's five or six games where we've played together now in a row - these matches and the West Indies series - and you actually learn how to bat with each other, which is an underrated thing," Stubbs said.
For Stubbs, it is a full-circle moment- from dreaming of batting like Miller to building partnerships alongside him on the world stage.
