SOUTH Africans might be surprised to learn that David Miller has faced as many as 4007 balls in first-class cricket. Or even that he has already played 64 one-day internationals.

Miller? The T20 basher? A proper cricketer? Really? Damn straight. In fact, after he and fellow centurion JP Duminy guided SA from 83-4 to 339-4 against Zimbabwe in Hamilton on Sunday, Miller could get away with calling himself the king of Albania.

But he will settle for being taken more seriously as a batsman, not a basher.

"I haven't played as much first-class cricket as I would have liked to, but I've tried to work with what I've got," Miller said. "I've tried to play as much T20 as I can in the off-season, which is the only cricket I've been given a chance to play.

"I've been working really hard in the last two years to try and rotate the strike and build an innings. To try and take that into four-day cricket would be ideal. These are the things I've been working on in the last year, year-and-a-half for Yorkshire and Durham and in the IPL [Indian Premier League]."

The mad reality of modern cricket is that players who have talent, skill and temperament are more likely to make their name bashing balls as mercenaries in some circus of gratuitousness than proving they can survive and prosper at international level.

Miller has walked those crooked miles. Now he wants to get onto the straight and narrow of performing for SA where it counts: in the World Cup.

"To score my first hundred a couple of games ago and follow up with this one, to come out and do it in my first game in the World Cup, is really satisfying," Miller said.