Denied O’Keefe could have given it all away

STEPHEN O’Keefe was written off by so many in Australian cricket, he gave serious consideration to walking away from it all to set up a bar with teammate Peter Nevill in Thailand. As selectors rolled through a never-ending and generally underwhelming production line of 13 spinners in the wake of Shane Warne’s retirement, O’Keefe was consigned to the backwaters of state cricket where his superior figures were flatly ignored by the most influential people in the game. When O’Keefe’s mother Jann learned of the thought her son was giving to packing it all up and moving overseas, she quietly “held her breath” and wished, “please no.” Yesterday, Mrs O’Keefe was back in Penrith cheering on the Hawkesbury team who gave Australia’s newest 32-year-old star his start, toasting the achievements of “the boy” who fought all the odds and conquered the might of India.

The O’Keefes are a humble working-class family from Richmond in Sydney’s west and Jann yesterday reflected with pride on the hours spent stuck on Parramatta Road in gridlocked traffic in a 1988 Ford Laser with no airconditioning, to get her son to the SCG – often on no sleep after her night shift at the Hawkesbury hospital, where she worked as a registered nurse. “He’s done the hard yards and he’s come back fighting and that’s what he does,” Jann said. “That’s what we all do, don’t we? “We’re from a working background like a lot of people and you make ends meet with what you’ve got and do what you can with what you’ve got. It was no big deal. In fact, we loved it.”