KENNY MILLER’S career took him far and wide, including spells with both Old Firm sides.
But he didn’t compete at the very top of Scottish football throughout his career.
Kenny Miller played at both Premiership and Championship level for Rangers[/caption]
He dropped back down to the second tier to end his career with Partick Thistle[/caption]
Hearts star James Penrice played with him at Firhill and has opened up on his former teammate’s stay[/caption]
After leaving Rangers in 2018, Miller spent a season fighting further down the Scottish Premiership, first with Livingston and then with Dundee.
After suffering relegation with the Dee, Miller stepped down a level to the Championship to spend the final year of his career with Partick Thistle.
It wasn’t quite the swansong Miller’s career deserved, as the COVID pandemic cut the season short and saw Thistle relegated to League One with nine games going unplayed.
And Hearts star James Penrice, who was at Thistle at the time, has opened up to the Open Goal podcast on the difficulties Miller faced dropping down to join the Glasgow side.
Penrice said: “I thought it was difficult for him because he was coming down to play with us.
“We weren’t in a great run of form, we were struggling a bit and he’s obviously come down being used to playing with better players at his level.
“There was times he was dropping back into left-back and telling me to f**k off, just to get the ball and try and make something happen.
“It was obviously difficult for him, he was trying to drive the standards.”
Penrice also revealed the ins and outs of his switch to Hearts from Livingston in the summer, detailing his meeting with then-manager Steven Naismith and what he was told he had to improve on to make the switch to Edinburgh.
He said: “[I met] Naisy and Joe Savage [former sporting director] in the January.
“He actually pulled me aside, we were playing 2nd January, and my agent had spoken to a couple of teams.
“I was walking around the pitch, I was actually injured, and as I was walking around the pitch Naisy has pulled me to the side of the pitch and said ‘I’m going to speak to you soon’.
“They had a wee laptop with all my clips and stuff, good bits and bad bits, I walked out and phoned my mum and said I was signing for Hearts, nobody else.
“Livingston played a different way so a lot of the time it was finding channels and stuff like that, smashing the ball long.
“He basically said when you come to Hearts you can’t do that, it’s not the way we play, he showed me the clips, showed me the good bits about getting forward and crossing into the box and he said this is what I want you to bring to Hearts.
“At the time I was coming in to compete with [Alex] Cochrane and Naismith said ‘I think Alex is a wee bit in front of you’, but I said ‘sorry, I don’t think he is’.
“I was brought in to be the backup, they didn’t expect a lot from me when I was joining and a lot of people were saying ‘why is he going to Hearts, he’s not going to play’.
“I saw it as an opportunity to kick on and I think I’ve done that this season.”
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