Australian spinner Steve O’Keefe has a little bit of time to chat before he fronts a team meeting with the Sydney Sixers. He hasn’t spoken with management following his recent decision to play grade cricket over his BBL commitments, so he’s anticipating a “please explain”.
“Which is rightfully so,” he tells Guardian Australia. “They’re allowed to get the shits, aren’t they? They’re trying to win a tournament and I’ve pulled out halfway through of my own accord, so it’s understandable.”
It’s hardly the sentiment you’d associate with high treason. O’Keefe’s capacity to empathise is instructive, even if it’s been hard-won. He recalls a younger version of himself who would berate his Mum for a poor training session.
“She used to work as a night duty Nurse in the emergency department before driving me 65 kilometres from Richmond to the SCG for under 17s training,” O’Keefe says. “Our blue Ford Laser didn’t have air conditioning, and I’d be kicking the back seat blaming her for my terrible net. She’d had zero sleep and had probably dealt with drunks all night, and I was worried about being dehydrated. She made incredible sacrifices for me.”
Now, after twelve years of first class cricket, Australia’s second-choice Test spinner has an acute awareness of the climate around him. Players and contracts come and go, and commercial imperatives are exactly that. Everyone has a view, and influence waxes and wanes.
At 32, O’Keefe has lived the life of a cricket pro, and after years of having to overachieve just to remain in the conversation, he finally finds himself a pivotal figure in his country’s sternest cricketing test: a long, hot Test tour to India.
In a “Pathways” world where the unearthing and accelerating of young talent trumps all, the boy from Hawkesbury is used to finding alternate ways to the top. After moving from Melbourne to Sydney aged eight, his Mum, Jan, encouraged him to play cricket in a bid to get him outdoors. O’Keefe laughs as he recalls his first attempt at joining a local club.
“The first team that I went to play for rejected me because they’d won it the year before,” he says. “The Richmond Services Club knocked me back; they’d won the under 10’s tournament the previous year and didn’t want to disrupt the make up of their side.”
So O’Keefe was forced to join what he deemed the “unfashionable” North Richmond unit, and promptly helped his team snatch the title from the club that scorned him.
Those formative experiences share similarities with the profesional career that’s followed. Having waited five years between his first-class debut in 2005 and his next game for New South Wales, O’Keefe knows what it means to be on the cricketing brink. He describes the lost years as a season-by-season proposition, as NSW sought other spinners who perhaps turned the ball further, or had a superior “best ball”.
“They made it pretty clear what they thought of my bowling early on,” O’Keefe says. “Maybe a second spinner who bats a little.”
After finally receiving a shot following injuries to other candidates, O’Keefe was soon convinced his career was about to end. The scene: a Sheffield Shield fixture at Adelaide Oval. Josh Hazlewood had broken down and New South Wales were a bowler short.
“I’d opened the bowling and I was none for 80,” O’Keefe says. “I literally went home that night and thought, ‘that’s it, that’s your career basically done and dusted’.”
“I came in the next morning. Simon Katich put his arm around me and said, ‘you did a great job yesterday. You’re going to start up again for us this morning. This game will break open and you’re going to play a big part.’ At this stage I had literally zero belief in what I was doing. The wicket broke up and I finished with seven wickets for the game. If I played under another captain I could have been rinsed at 0/80, and not bowled another over.”
When it’s put to him that Katich saved his career, O’Keefe is unequivocal. “Without a doubt,” he says. “Simon was pivotal to me. I can thank him, and [then coach] Matthew Mott for my New South Wales playing career.”
Not that the naysayers relented. At around the same time, O’Keefe made what was often a perilous pilgrimage for spinners, traveling to the national cricket academy for six weeks. He returned both scalded but wiser for an experience with the late Terry Jenner.
“I went to the academy when I was 25 when Terry Jenner was the spin bowling coach up there. He had us for six weeks and it was like something out of the movie Whiplash. He said I bowled ‘blancmanges’ [a French custard] and I felt like no matter what ball I bowled, even if it spun, it was just never good enough.”
“And after about a month of this I’d go home lose sleep thinking, ‘I’m just bowling absolute shit here’. He’d just look at me in disgust about how putrid these things were that were coming out of my hand.”
Being castigated by a man famed for his role as Shane Warne’s guru may have caused most to wilt, but O’Keefe interpreted it differently.
“Something triggered in me and I just thought, ‘you know what, I’ve just got to embrace what I do’. I figured that if it actually is shit and it’s not good enough then I might as well do it my own way. Of course I want to prove them wrong but that’s not the big driver. I’ve just learnt to be comfortable with who I am. For that reason the academy was one of the best experiences I’ve had.”
“Now when I play my cricket I have that belief in myself. When Warne and these guys come out and say ‘he doesn’t spin it enough,’ and ‘his best ball’s not good enough to get batters out,’ it’s almost like white noise because I’ve heard it for so long.”
Never a player picked on potential alone, O’Keefe’s recently unrivalled spin record in first-class cricket has now paved the way for an extended shot in the national Test squad. India await, and he’s as honest, pragmatic and balanced as ever about his prospects.
“Of course I’m nervous. Before any game of cricket I feel sick, I have doubts, I picture the worst-case scenario, it’s hard sleeping in the middle of games and I do listen to what other people say.”
“But I’m at peace because I know right now this is about the best time possible for getting picked. I’m comfortable in my own skin. I’ve got a bit of skin in the game because I’ve got some wickets, but I’m also comfortable that if it doesn’t go well I’ve given it a good shot.”
