Fit-again midfielder Stuart O’Keefe praised the Gillingham medical men for helping him return to action quicker than expected.

O’Keefe broke a leg and suffered ankle damage during the League Cup game against Coventry City in mid-September. It was initially feared that the vice captain would miss the rest of the season.

But O’Keefe knocked months off that return date and after a handful of appearance off the bench he made his first start since the injury at Charlton on Saturday, helping the Gills to a 3-2 win.

He said: “Fair play to the medical team at Gillingham. It is credit to them as much as me to come back as early as I did from what for me was probably the most serious injury I have had in my career.

“When you hear ‘leg break’ and ‘ankle damage’ you fear the worst, you hear ‘9-12 months’ and these figures are thrown about but you can’t get drawn into that because it’s such a long process, you have to take it day by day.

“You can’t think how long you could be out, you have to do it right, get fit, do everything the surgeon and the physio is telling you. It happened to be that I was back before it was expected and that is great.

“I had good days where I felt really good and bad days where I didn’t feel as good, but you can’t be too up and down, there needs to be a consistency and an end goal to get fit. The medical and fitness team, with Gaz (Gary Hemens, physio) and Jammo (James Russell, fitness coach), they have been excellent with me. We worked night and day to get as fit as we can and as strong as we can and touch wood everything is fine. It was brilliant to come back early.”

O’Keefe, speaking before the weekend, was eyeing up a run of positive results to get back into play-off contention. Victory over Charlton keeps them in the hunt and a run of results now is going to be key.

He said: “We have got a lot of fixtures coming up, a lot of Saturday-Tuesdays, and if anyone is going to make a run for it then you need to start building some consistency and getting some positive results.

“A few wins will see us jump a lot of places and if we can get back to back wins it makes the table look completely different with a platform to go into the last few months of the season.”

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