The Keays that unlock everything
Thoughts on what footy’s happy warrior can teach us.
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The Crows have played 149 games since the 2020 AFL season returned from its three-month Covid hiatus. Ben Keays has played in all 149. This Thursday night, he will run out – with his characteristically upright bearing – for his 150th consecutive game and 150th in red, yellow, and blue. It is one of footy’s most satisfying redemption stories, a triumph of guts, grit, and perseverance. It is also, for those same reasons, a story rich in lessons for rebuilding clubs.
The world’s most Brisbane-coded man was born in Melbourne. At an opportune time, it turns out, because it coincided with his beloved Lions making frequent trips there on the last Saturday in September. Ben was four when the Lions broke the drought in 2001 and cried all the way home when Port Adelaide denied them a historic fourpeat three years later. By then, the Keays family had moved to Brisbane. Ben took the only path available to a talented junior footy player at the time: he joined the Lions’ Academy. It was there he established himself as one of the most promising midfielders in the 2015 draft pool. In his draft year, Keays captained Queensland to the Under-18s title, averaging nearly 29 disposals in the process. The strengths and weaknesses recruiters identified then are still present today, 11 years on: Keays knows how to find the footy but doesn’t always capitalise when he does. He runs all day but rarely at a speed that makes opponents nervous. Despite that, he was then, and is now, as honest as the day is long. Keays was drafted with Pick 24 in the 2015 draft. It was a dream come true for the boy who lived just down the road from the Gabba.
But dreams don’t always come true. Keays was delisted after four seasons. His last two years on the Lions’ list yielded just four games. It was a typical story: he was edged out by better midfielders. Lachie Neale’s hands were cleaner. Hugh McCluggage’s kicking was more penetrative. Jarryd Lyons and Jarrod Berry ran just as hard. After years of toil, the Lions were finally climbing out of the footy basement. Keays wasn’t quite quick enough or slick enough to go where they were going.
Getting delisted by the club you’ve loved since you were old enough to love must be close to the worst feeling in the world. If something that devastating happened to me, I’d probably just stare at the ceiling for months. But Keays was made of sterner stuff. Instead of lamenting what might have been, he nominated for footy’s last chance saloon: the Rookie Draft. He was selected with the seventh pick, right before Fremantle selected Jarvis Pina (I confess I’m unfamiliar) and immediately prior to Port’s selection of Jake Pasini.
It’s very important to understand the condition of the ship attached to the life preserver Keays caught. The Crows were at their lowest-ever ebb. The tripartite trauma of the murder of former coach Phil Walsh, the 2017 Grand Final defeat, and the debacle of the Collective Minds camp – which Mitch McGovern called a cult in a recent podcast interview – had created a maelstrom which enveloped the club and came close to destroying it. Staff were sacked. Players couldn’t leave quickly enough. The best team in footy for all but one week of 2017 became the worst environment off-field, and one of the worst sides on-field, in two years – brought low by hubris and a fundamental misunderstanding of why the Grand Final went the way it did. It’s not a contest. All rebuilding sides are in bad shape. But the Crows were in uniquely bad shape because, as the Collective Minds camp demonstrated, the entire club – not just the list – was in need of serious reform.
Ben Keays left a rising club and, because he had no other choice, joined a shattered one. His job was to help piece it back together, step by step. He approached his task with the fidelity and dedication of a bright-eyed private. In Keays’ third game for Adelaide, he attended 90% of centre bounces. Only Matt Crouch and Reilly O’Brien who attended more across the entire season. 2020 was a very bad season for the Crows. They lost their first 13 games on their way to winning their first-ever wooden spoon. The list was desperately short on talent. The best players were Rory Laird, a Taylor Walker who looked ready for the knacker’s yard, and a post-peak Rory Sloane. Despite that, it still felt better than the two preceding years, because it felt like the tentative beginning of a new arc rather than the wretched end of an old one. One Adelaide player apparently said that “the culture was better at 0-13 in 2020 than it was at 13-8 in 2019.”
Keays finished fifth in Adelaide’s best-and-fairest count in his first season at the club. He was also named the winner of the Players’ Trademark Award, given to the player who has “best upheld the core values of the team on and off the field”. A tin pot? Maybe. But it was also recognition of the work Keays was doing, even then, with his own playing career at a precarious point, to maximise his and his team’s potential: showing up early, leaving late, bigging up teammates, busting a gut during games. He was the earliest instantiation of the style and culture Matthew Nicks was brought in to build: hard-working, physical, unglamorous, a pain in the arse to play against.
After Brad Crouch left the Crows after 2020, Keays became part of footy’s blondest, most workmanlike midfield, together with O’Brien, Laird, and Sloane. It wasn’t always pretty. But it got results. Adelaide won as many games in the first month of the 2021 season as in the entirety of the prior season. Keays was in the Crows’ top five-rated players in all four of those games. He recorded seven coaches’ votes in Adelaide’s famous one-point win over Melbourne in Round 10 and finished second in the best-and-fairest, just three votes behind Laird, as Adelaide finished 15th. The Crows weren’t yet a good side, but Keays was playing a leading role in making them a competitive one.
Although the addition of Jordan Dawson and Josh Rachele added some firepower, Adelaide remained a workhorse side in 2022 – a fact exemplified by Laird, Keays, Crouch, and Berry attending the vast majority of centre bounces. But then something really interesting happened. In the Round 20 game against Carlton, Keays didn’t attend a single centre bounce. He didn’t play in the midfield at all. Instead, he was redeployed to half-forward, with a specific brief: bring the same energy, pressure, and unconditional effort to the forward line. With eight minutes remaining in the second quarter, Keays kicked what has become his trademark goal: from the goal square, without an opposition defender in sight. His second was virtually identical. So was his third. That night was the first time Keays had ever kicked three goals in an AFL game. It was, also, fittingly, the beginning of the third act of his career. He’d been a fringe midfielder at his boyhood club. He’d been a culture-builder and standard-setter in the earliest days of a rebuild. Now, just as it looked as though he’d be squeezed out of the midfield rotations, he was asked to evolve.
Like all successful player role changes, Keays’ reassignment to half-forward feels obvious in hindsight. But, although we’ve all become more acquainted with the concept of the “high half-forward” in recent seasons, it didn’t feel obvious that a burly midfielder with weak overhead marking and indifferent disposal would flourish closer to goal. Keays became a very good AFL half-forward because of his athletic and psychological traits. He’s a ferocious tackler who uses his remarkable aerobic power to get to contests, manufacture space, and provide an outlet for teammates. He also understands how precarious life in the AFL is, and chases every lost cause as though his career depends on it. But he’s also become a very good half-forward because Adelaide’s coaching staff correctly recognised the way the game was trending.
As the game has increased and the speed of a side’s ball movement, especially after it affects a turnover, has become increasingly paramount, the attacking half-back has become a potent weapon. But sometimes they turn the ball over. Sometimes they don’t run as quickly back towards their defensive goal as they did towards the goal their side is attacking. In other words, they’re exploitable. And Ben Keays is the perfect player to exploit those lapses in skill and work rate. He is a hard counter to unaccountable half-backs. If you watch the highlights of that first game Keays played as a half-forward, you can occasionally see a forlorn Adam Saad about 10 metres behind him. That’s no coincidence. Keays was asked to stay close to Saad when he had the ball, and to exploit his defensive running when Adelaide won it. Since that night, Keays has become an acid test for opposition transition structures. He will always keep running. Will you?
It’s no coincidence that Keays performs best against the sides which fail that test most often. The three sides he’s kicked the most goals against are Carlton, North Melbourne, and Essendon. Yes, worse sides concede bigger scores. But they also don’t defend with as much discipline. Opposition supporters will frequently lament how their side allowed Keays to kick three or four goals on them. “How was he by himself in the goal square?” is a common complaint. The answer is simple: he wanted it more than his opponents did. It’s possible no one has ever wanted anything more than Ben Keays has wanted to carve out the AFL career he has. The trademark Keays goal, the one he must have kicked 50 times in Crows colours, isn’t a coincidence. It’s him using his attributes to their full effect. And one of his best attributes is his desire. When Keays shuttle runs up and down the field, he’s putting yards between everyone who ever told him he was too slow, or not skilful enough to make it.
Adelaide has become a good side. But, despite having better players to rely on, the Crows are still moulded from the same clay Keays helped to mine in his early days at the club. They win by applying manic pressure and generating volume rather than moving the ball precisely. Their best work is done off the ball. They win when they out-work, out-tackle, and out-compete their opposition. Keays’ role has changed – he has attended just 29 centre bounces since the start of the 2024 season – but he still sets those standards. Because he does, he has come to embody lessons which every rebuilding side should heed, but not all do.
The first is that culture and character matter. The Adelaide Football Club was a deeply unhappy workplace when Keays arrived. He has helped make it a happier and more professional environment, both because he never compromises on his professionalism and because he encourages his teammates to never neglect theirs. Keays appears to be completely earnest at all times. Sometimes that manifests in corny ways. On the “Crows Show”, a magazine program dedicated to club-related light entertainment, Keays hosts a segment where he drives teammates around in a sponsor vehicle and talks to them about their footy journey. His earnestness is also apparent in more serious forms. Keays’ great-grandfather Fred and great-uncle Desmond both served in the Australian army (they also both played for Fitzroy – very likely the origin of Ben’s love for the Lions). Great-grandfather Fred was at Gallipoli and, later, fought on the Western Front. Ben admits that, had footy not worked out, he’d probably have followed the family tradition and served. He has often been involved in the design of Adelaide’s ANZAC Round guernsey. Footy and the army are very different. But the values that footy clubs profess to exhibit are strikingly similar to the ones soldiers talk about: mateship, camaraderie, duty, loyalty, sacrifice. Perhaps you think this is absurd. What is clear is that Ben Keays, and the footy team he’s played 149 games for, do not. He has maximised his own potential, and he’ll be damned if his teammates don’t fulfill theirs.
The second lesson Ben Keays can teach footy clubs is that there’s talent to be found in unlikely places. Supporters, sometimes immediately after claiming there isn’t enough talent to sustain 18 professional clubs, will often lament that their club isn’t scouring the state leagues for moneyball prospects. Keays was one of those prospects. Although he was on Brisbane’s AFL list for four years, he only played four senior games in the last two. He was a force of nature in the NEAFL, recording four goals, 27 disposals, and seven tackles in Brisbane’s reserves premiership in 2019. Adelaide’s recruiters didn’t cover themselves in glory at the 2019 National Draft, but they correctly identified that Keays possessed traits which could translate to AFL level.
Culture and character matter. Leaving no stone unturned for talent matters. So does a player’s psychological make-up. One of the traits which enabled Keays to become a good AFL player is that he never relented in the face of adversity. Remember: he was delisted by the Lions and lost his first 12 games at Adelaide. A less resilient person might have wilted. We know that recruiters and list managers value this. In my recent interview with “Alex”, a current AFL list manager, he discussed the importance of mental strength in player development:
“Often, that top-end kid has been the best his whole life. And then he gets into an AFL program, and I don’t care who you are: if you’re a first-year player, for the most part, it’s a grind. You’re down the bottom of the list. There are 20 players ahead of you when you start, but that hasn’t been the case throughout their journey. How do they respond to that? Do they work harder? Because they’re going to have to. Or does it become too hard? Because the AFL is hard.”
Keays was never quite a blue-chip draft prospect. But he was still taken in the top two-dozen following an illustrious junior career. He must have believed the first four years of his career would pan out differently. Instead of bemoaning what might have been, his response was to master the things within his control. Perhaps Keays will never be the most talented player on a footy field. But he will almost always be one of the most committed.
The fourth and final lesson of Ben Keays is that adaptability matters. After Adelaide spent a few years accumulating midfield talent through the draft and hit the jackpot with the recruitment of Jordan Dawson, Keays’ days as a permanent midfielder were numbered. That late-season game against Carlton was his audition for a different role. Had he not passed with such flying colours, there’s every chance I wouldn’t be writing this piece. Again, the success of his redeployment as a blue-collar half-forward wasn’t anywhere near as inevitable as hindsight makes it seem. As rebuilding sides improve, the guys who were there to set standards in the early days often get squeezed out for more talented players. That’s usually a sign of progress. But the risk is that without those standard-setters, standards, well, decline. It’s a huge credit to Keays, and his coaches, that he has used the attributes he’s always had to adapt to a different role – one that’s almost inarguably a better fit for him and team.
I laughed when I learnt that Adelaide staff presented to the AFL Commission about its rebuild on the day of last year’s Brownlow Medal ceremony. The Crows have done many things right since 2020. But the two most consequential moments of the rebuild – persuading homesick boyhood Crows fans Jordan Dawson and Izak Rankine to come home – simply aren’t replicable for a side like, say, North Melbourne. Luck and timing play a bigger role in any side’s success than we like to admit. But there was nothing stopping other rebuilding sides from drafting Ben Keays – or persuading him to join as a delisted free agent – following his time at Brisbane. The career he has manufactured at the Crows is a 95th-percentile outcome. No one could have predicted it. But what was possible to predict is that bringing in a guy who carries himself with integrity, and refuses to give up, will yield benefits that are likely to flow through a club. Rebuilding clubs must confront many important questions on the journey back to competitiveness. The one which generates the most media attention and supporter clamour is always which elite prospect to draft with the coveted high pick. But arguably just as important – although much less discussed – is how to find those guys who want it so badly they will run through a brick wall to make it happen. And then run some more.
It’s possible to read Keays’ career in vaguely tragic terms: delisted by his boyhood club, incorrectly denied what would have been a career highlight by a goal umpire, being part of a side which summarily failed its finals test last year. But I don’t see it that way, and I don’t think he would either. The correct reading is that Keays is emblematic of footy’s vast emotional richness. He has faced great adversity and disappointment. And instead of giving up, he has wrung every drop of blood, sweat, and tears out of himself. This Thursday night, a Collingwood half-back will slow to a jog, believing he has a moment to breathe. He won’t notice Ben Keays until it’s too late. No one ever does.
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All credit to Ben Keays for scratching out his career against the odds. It says a lot about the way clubs select their lists that someone like Keays always has to struggle to keep his spot despite his many attributes. It is the selection of players like Keays to fill out the best 23 that make all of the difference for a successful team in my view.
Selecting Harley Reid, Patrick Cripps and Marcus Bontempelli are all no- brainers but the supporting cast is a different matter and it is the second tier players that create the great teams. I reckon clubs are all too ready to chase the birds in the bush rather than look at what they already have at hand. The pursuit of the new is always more exciting than repurposing the old.