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Steve O’Keefe’s Test career may have come to a premature end despite the fact only two Australian spinners in the past 40 years have made a better start to their Test stints.
With O’Keefe overlooked for the current Australia A tour of India, and no chance for him to impress in the Sheffield Shield before Australia pick their squad for October’s Tests against Pakistan, it’s hard to see the 33-year-old playing international cricket again.
Nathan Lyon is ensconced as Australia’s first choice Test spinner, they rarely play a second spinner at home, and their following Test tour in Asia is not until 2020.
After Stuart MacGill retired in 2008, Australia spent years trying to find even a competent Test spinner, only for two tweakers to shine in tandem in India last year for the first time since the days of MacGill and Shane Warne.
That spin pair was Nathan Lyon and O’Keefe, with the latter single-handedly ending Australia’s 11-Test losing streak in Asia by grabbing 12-70 as they thrashed India in Pune.
O’Keefe finished that series in India with 19 wickets at 23, the kind of figures the Australian selectors would have salivated over six weeks earlier.
But O’Keefe swiftly undid that fine work by acting like a troll off the field, leading to a playing ban from NSW, the loss of his Cricket Australia contract, and his omission from the initial squad for Australia’s next Test series, in Bangladesh.
O’Keefe made a surprise return for the second Test of that series, after Josh Hazlewood got injured, with Australia making the ultra-rare choice of fielding three spinners. Even still, it seems O’Keefe’s Test career hangs by a thread.
Steve O’Keefe (AP Photo/Rajanish Kakade)
Among Australian spinners in the past 40 years, only MacGill and off spinner Tim May have taken more wickets than O’Keefe after nine Tests.
Number of wickets after nine Tests:
Stuart MacGill – 50 wickets
Tim May – 38 wickets
Steve O’Keefe – 35 wickets
Jim Higgs – 34 wickets
Nathan Hauritz – 31 wickets
Bob Holland – 30 wickets
Nathan Lyon – 24 wickets
Bruce Yardley – 24 wickets
Shane Warne – 21 wickets
Peter Taylor – 21 wickets
Peter Sleep – 17 wickets
Greg Matthews – 13 wickets
Despite this impressive record it seems very likely O’Keefe will be overlooked for the tour of Pakistan in favour of fellow left armer Ashton Agar.
It was Agar who took O’Keefe’s place in the Test team in Bangladesh, with the 24-year-old performing impressively. Agar took seven wickets at 23 and also played a couple of handy knocks with the bat.
In the first Test he came to the crease with Australia in a mess at 7 for 124 and compiled a measured knock of 41no from 97 balls, before in the second Test he chipped in with 22 to help push Australia up to a match-winning total of 377.
Agar’s confident batting against spin in that series will likely be a major advantage over O’Keefe when the selectors pick their squad to play Pakistan.
With handy late order batsman Pat Cummins to miss that series, I suspect Australia will be concerned about the length of their tail. This will be of particular relevance given the struggles of their top seven the last time they toured the UAE.
Agar’s famous knock of 98 on debut in the 2013 Ashes means he scored more runs in his first Test innings than O’Keefe has from 13 innings to date (86 runs).
Having Agar at eight and Mitchell Starc at nine against Pakistan would give Australia some insurance should their top seven falter. Such batting depth is a priority for most Test teams these days, which does not bode well for O’Keefe.
The other factor weighing against O’Keefe is age. At nine years younger than O’Keefe, Agar clearly has greater upside and with experience could become a valuable player in Asian conditions over the next decade.
Ashton Agar is a fine prospect for the Aussie Test team as an all rounder. (AFP, Saeed Khan)
I expect Agar to be selected alongside Lyon against Pakistan unless he is comprehensively outbowled in India over the next month by his fellow Australia A spinners Mitchell Swepson and Jon Holland.
Swepson and Holland are both batting bunnies which I believe, similar to O’Keefe, will leave them at a major disadvantage to Agar in the minds of the selectors.
Holland has been outstanding over the past four Shield seasons, taking 89 wickets at 23. But he’s 31 years old, is very injury-prone for a spinner, and has seemed to be out of favour with the Australian selectors since his poor Test debut in Sri Lanka two years ago.
Swepson, meanwhile, has generous potential in the longest format but remains raw and has a disconcerting habit of bleeding runs, as evidenced by his sky-high economy rate of 4.01 runs per over in first-class cricket.
All this leads me to believe the second spin spot against Pakistan is Agar’s to lose and that, barring a spate of injuries, O’Keefe’s Test career is all but done.