FOOTBALL COMMENTATOR:\u00a0Daniher takes it away.\u00a0<\/p>\n
FOOTBALL COMMENTATOR:\u00a0Beautiful kick by Daniher.\u00a0<\/p>\n
ADAM HARVEY, REPORTER:\u00a0The boy from West Wyalong in New South Wales hit the VFL at full tilt.\u00a0<\/p>\n
FOOTBALL COMMENTATOR:\u00a0Gives a great pass to Neale Daniher who drives it down to full forward and it could be a goal.\u00a0<\/p>\n
KEVIN SHEEDY, FMR AFL COACH AND CHAMPION PLAYER:\u00a0 I thought a 20-year-old guy, he was well advanced ahead of his age sort of, and he took that out on the ground and played accordingly.<\/p>\n
ADAM HARVEY:\u00a0 Coach Kevin Sheedy picked Neale Daniher as Essendon\u2019s youngest-ever captain\u00a0<\/p>\n
ADAM HARVEY:\u00a0 But his knees shattered and so did his playing career.<\/p>\n
NEALE DANIHER:\u00a0 For the first injury I thought six, seven months and I\u2019ll be back in it again. Three and a half years later, I\u2019m still waiting on that six months.\u00a0<\/p>\n
KEVIN SHEEDY:\u00a0 He had three knee reconstructions and come back nine years later.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Yes, frustrating. Absolutely. Did it mature him and understand how lucky maybe he was to have the talent and the intuition to overcome problems.\u00a0<\/p>\n
ADAM HARVEY:\u00a0 But Daniher wasn\u2019t finished with the game \u2013 he returned as a coach hired by his old mentor who admired his ruthless streak.\u00a0<\/p>\n
KEVIN SHEEDY:\u00a0 That’s why I got him. Sometimes you’ve got to play good cop and bad cop when I was over being the bad cop. So Neale pull out the guns every now and then and have a crack yourself. And he was brilliant at that.\u00a0<\/p>\n
ADAM HARVEY:\u00a0 He coached Fremantle, then Melbourne. In 2000 he took the Demons all the way to the Grand Final against his old team and Kevin Sheedy. The Demons lost by 60 points.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He was diagnosed with motor neurone disease 13 years old and Neale Daniher\u2019s third act began.\u00a0<\/p>\n
NEALE DANIHER:\u00a0 I got passed the grieving fairly quickly because grieving don\u2019t get you anywhere.<\/p>\n
MATT TILLEY, FIGHTMND CEO:\u00a0I never heard him complain, never saw him complain. I saw him get frustrated with his condition, but that wasn’t at anyone. It was at the disease and his incapacity to do more.<\/p>\n
ADAM HARVEY:\u00a0 But Daniher did more than just about anyone focusing his tenacity on fundraisers that grabbed peoples\u2019 attention raising around $140 million in donations.\u00a0<\/p>\n
MATT TILLEY:\u00a0 We were a backwater. There was maybe two or three researchers at the Florey Institute dabbling around MND research. There’s now over 40. There were no clinical trials in Australia. If you had MND, you would not be part of any big pharma plans to try new drugs. We’ve had over 40 now.<\/p>\n
ADAM HARVEY:\u00a0 Driving it all Neale Daniher who eventually lost the ability to speak but could still send an email.\u00a0<\/p>\n
MATT TILLEY:\u00a0 He was involved on a daily basis. So my inbox would often be full with requests for spreadsheets, plans, recognition of new trends that we should be following in the fundraising space.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Yeah, he was tough on me. He was tough on lots of people. You know, I felt a little bit of that too. But that’s also a great honour. It means he believes in you and he wants to get the best out of you. And yeah, he was very much involved, but he never gave you a free kick.<\/p>\n
KEVIN SHEEDY:\u00a0 Neale’s a very tough person. He just looks a nice person, he’s very tough.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He will take anything on to think that it’s worthwhile for our human race and he\u2019s basically half a saint sort of thing. What he’s done is quite remarkable. I haven’t seen anybody else do that in my lifetime.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"FOOTBALL COMMENTATOR:\u00a0Daniher takes it away.\u00a0 FOOTBALL COMMENTATOR:\u00a0Beautiful kick by Daniher.\u00a0 ADAM HARVEY, REPORTER:\u00a0The boy from West Wyalong in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":696126,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[560],"tags":[638,64,63,55,639,58109,231136,85],"class_list":["post-696125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-afl","tag-afl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-australian-football-league","tag-australianfootballleague","tag-motor-neurone-disease","tag-neale-daniher","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/696125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=696125"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/696125\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/696126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=696125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=696125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=696125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}