He took more than 1,000 first-class wickets and played in 34 Tests for the England cricket team alongside the likes of Ian Botham. Now Geoff Miller is a national team selector and after-dinner speaker. He likes the odd pint too.

We hear you like the pub. What attracts you to a certain place?
If I go to a pub now I generally go with my wife. Sometimes if I’m speaking at a function and I have to stop over I’ll have a pint or two somewhere as well. I do like my beers but I like my wines too.

And is choosing where to go as tricky as picking the England cricket team?
Ha, you’ve been building up to that one! No. If I’m with my wife I don’t get to make that decision! I live just outside Chesterfield and we have a lot of local country pubs around the area. Sometimes we will go for a meal and other times it is a drinking occasion.

Do you ever watch cricket in the pub?
I don’t really, to be fair. If there were two screens in a pub and one was showing cricket and one was showing rugby I’d watch the rugby. Because I know full well that every game of cricket that is on TV, I have got it taped and I’ll watch it later, probably having watched a live game earlier. If I was with the wife there is no way I’d watch it in the pub when I’ve been doing just that for six or seven days a week.

But do you think the pub has become a good place to watch cricket?
Definitely. You drive about and you see so many blackboards promoting Tests or Twenty20. The latter has helped and that has a different audience from the one-day and Test matches. It can be a really big draw for pubs.

There’s a real historical link between the pub and cricket isn’t there?
There is and it isn’t just the village teams either, it is club cricket as well. Cricket has always been a social game. I played club cricket before I started playing county and that was always very social. In the old era of county cricket you used to socialise with the opposition in a local pub. If I came down to London I would have a pint in the pub with Fred Titmus: (A) enjoying a pint and (B) learning about spin bowling and furthering my career. I might have got those in the wrong order actually…

Has the pub helped you with your after-dinner speaking?
I didn’t know what I was going to do when I finished playing. What I wanted to do was make sure that whatever I did after cricket that I had a lot of stories and memories that I could relate in public. I didn’t know I was going to go into the business of after-dinner speaking. I did my first few and they were dreadful. I remember sitting in a pub and it was with a pint of Marston’s thinking “I need to sort some stories out here so if I get asked to speak after a dinner I can do it”. So the pub helped provide some inspiration.

You were a room-mate of Ian Botham’s when you toured with England. Was that entertaining?
Yes, I was for five years and it was entertaining. There were some interesting stories that involved alcohol. Now it’s very much professional and the fitness factor is far greater.

But do players still go to the pub?
There are times when they have to let their hair down. You can’t be on 100 per cent 100 per cent of the time because there’s a mental side of the game too. It is finding the right time to do that, and you must never bring the game into disrepute. Some of them are pubby people.
You’ve got people from all over the country with different characteristics. When you get into a changing room you find out the ones you go to a restaurant with and the ones you go to the pub with.

We have the West Indies, Australia and South Africacoming over this summer. What can pubs do to make the most of that?
All pubs can buy into different forms of the game. We are the number one Test side in the world at the moment and South Africa will be number two, so you would think pubs can get some mileage out of that contest. We can use that, plus they have one-day cricket and the Twenty20s, so I am sure they can get their arms around that. Pubs can really help that support. It’s a great summer of sport. If you think back to the Ashes home and away, it was euphoric and I hope the public don’t only get behind it when we take on Australia.

The England team is clearly working well — what are the key elements to a great team?
There is a good mix of people and characters. One thing they do is set their own changing room charter out. All of them have had to pass stringent tests they have set themselves. They have a list of things they think makes a good changing room and they adhere to that. This is their list, not the management’s. Pub staff could absolutely do that too.

What was the last pub you went to and what do you remember about it?
It was the Nettle in Ashover, which is a lovely little pub in the village. We pop in and have a lunch there. The food is very good, so is the atmosphere, and the lads who run it are top-drawer. There are four or five pubs in the area that we visit, we have a good choice.

Inapub was speaking to Geoff Miller at Lord’s courtesy of Marston’s Pedigree — the official beer of English cricket