DAVID MILLER didn't win a thing playing football in the East of Scotland League but he's close to chalking up a significant success on the golf course.
Since hanging up his boots, he played for both Craigroyston and Spartans, the 30-year-old has reduced his handicap from two to plus two, an improvement that has earned him a place in the Lothians team.
Now the Duddingston player is just two match
es away from winning the Lothians Championship, having progressed to the last four of the Forth Engineering-sponsored event with a 2 and 1 win over Royal Musselburgh's John Hall at Longniddry last night.
As Hall missed a string of putts early on, Miller stormed into a four-hole lead but, determined to try and make it to the semi-finals for the second year running, Hall
reduced the deficit to three holes when a par proved good enough at the 14th and really gave his opponent something to think about when holing a 25ft birdie putt to also win the 16th.
Disaster then almost struck Miller at the 17th. "I was just about to hit my second shot out of the rough when I noticed it wasn't my ball," he revealed. "There was a different marking on it and I saw it just in the nick of time."
Even then, Hall had a 15ft birdie putt to take the match down the last but, after he missed that attempt, Miller kept his nerve to sink a three-footer for his par.
"So far, so good," commented the winner, who knows he'll have to bring his A game with him when he faces Turnhouse star Steven Armstrong in tomorrow's semi-finals.
Like Miller, Armstrong was down early on in his match with David Marshall, the Marriott Dalmahoy man winning both the third and fourth holes with birdies before going three up when his opponent three-putted from the edge of the green at the sixth.
After watching in disbelief as putts stayed above ground at both the seventh and eighth, Armstrong finally got back into the game when Marshall, with his first slack shot of the night, found trouble off the tee at the par-4 tenth.
Armstrong, bidding to regain a title he won in 2004, also won the 11th and 12th before getting his nose in front for the first time with a birdie-2 at the 13th, where he holed a testing 12-footer down the hill.
A feisty competitor, Marshall squared the game with a birdie at the 16th, hitting his tee shot to a couple of feet, but he then suffered a cruel break when a good-looking tee shot at the 17th came to rest near the base of a tree.
From there, he was unable to reach the green and a par-4 was good enough to take Armstrong through to the last four.
Completing that line-up tomorrow morning will be North Berwick's Oliver Huish and Chris Orr.
Huish, 17, pulled off the shock of the night when he beat three-times champion Keith Nicholson by one hole in a scrappy affair.
Two up at one point, Huish, who showed his liking for match-play golf when he reached the semi-finals of the Scottish Boys' Championship earlier in the year, faced a real test of character when he boarded the 14th tee trailing his more experienced opponent for the first time.
"I was a bit annoyed and my dad (long-serving North Berwick professional David and caddie for this event) definitely came through for me at that point as he helped me settle down," admitted Huish afterwards.
Huish Snr reckoned a 4-4-3-4-4 finish would do the trick and so it proved.
Orr beat Greenburn's Brian Watson by 3 and 1.
The full article contains 638 words and appears in Edinburgh Evening News newspaper.
