Former Australian spinner Kerry O’Keeffe feels that Australian captain Steve Smith is not the right candidate to lead the country.
After losing the Indian series 2-1, O’Keeffe feels that Smith over-reacted a lot during the series. Smith did apologise for letting his “emotions falter”, which strained relations between both sides. O’Keeffe felt that even though Smith led with sincerity, he was often too emotional.
“He leads from the front [and] he’s finding out about leadership,” O’Keeffe said during an interview. “Is he temperamentally sound enough to be the captain of our country? Probably not because he’s so emotional. We’ve seen when he’s on the field he’s overly reacting to everything,” added the leg-spinner, who played 24 Tests for Australia and took 53 wickets.
O’Keeffe took the example of Smith’s outburst during Murali Vijay claiming a catch of Glenn Maxwell to justify his stance. “That catch was [not] cleanly taken. He decided to go with the cheat line. There’s an emotion to Steve Smith that basically is at the core of his game,” O’Keeffe said.
Smith still managed to keep his batting instincts in order though, scoring 499 runs in the series.
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