A “wee Champions League ball” is bouncing perfectly for Lennon Miller in the Aberdeen players’ lounge.
Father Lee, then a striker at the Pittodrie club, is blown away again by the freakish technique of his two-year-old son when he “absolutely creams one” on the volley.
With the ball mid-flight, his astonishment instantly turns to horror when the wife of then Aberdeen manager Jimmy Calderwood swings open the door to the lounge with a glass of wine in her hand.
Smash. Splash. “She was soaking,” Lee recalls. “We all just stopped and were thinking, ‘how’s she going to react to this?’. But she just laughed it off.”
At the same age, the former Scotland striker also remembers his young son oddly having the knowledge to dry the ball with his top before taking a throw.
And by the time he was four, the Motherwell midfielder was attempting corners on 11-a-side pitches, even though he “couldn’t hit the 18-yard box”.
Needless to say, football was – and still is – young Miller’s life, but his world was turned upside down at the age of just five following the loss of mother Donna, who died in 2012 after having cancer.
Now 18, and already a talismanic figure at Fir Park, doing mum proud is what drives the teenager, who has been included in Steve Clarke’s Scotland squad for the upcoming Nations League play-off with Greece.
“Going through that at such a young age, football has been my escape from such a devastating thing,” Miller tells BBC Scotland.
“I felt like every time I was in the house it was catching up on me and every time I was out on the pitch I forgot about it.
“If I was upset I’d always think about football, I’d talk to my dad about football. It was just my way of escaping it.”
