VIDEO: Remembering AFL great Neale Daniher

FOOTBALL COMMENTATOR: Daniher takes it away. 

FOOTBALL COMMENTATOR: Beautiful kick by Daniher. 

ADAM HARVEY, REPORTER: The boy from West Wyalong in New South Wales hit the VFL at full tilt. 

FOOTBALL COMMENTATOR: Gives a great pass to Neale Daniher who drives it down to full forward and it could be a goal. 

KEVIN SHEEDY, FMR AFL COACH AND CHAMPION PLAYER:  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.

ADAM HARVEY:  Coach Kevin Sheedy picked Neale Daniher as Essendon’s youngest-ever captain 

ADAM HARVEY:  But his knees shattered and so did his playing career.

NEALE DANIHER:  For the first injury I thought six, seven months and I’ll be back in it again. Three and a half years later, I’m still waiting on that six months. 

KEVIN SHEEDY:  He had three knee reconstructions and come back nine years later. 

Yes, frustrating. Absolutely. Did it mature him and understand how lucky maybe he was to have the talent and the intuition to overcome problems. 

ADAM HARVEY:  But Daniher wasn’t finished with the game – he returned as a coach hired by his old mentor who admired his ruthless streak. 

KEVIN SHEEDY:  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. 

ADAM HARVEY:  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. 

He was diagnosed with motor neurone disease 13 years old and Neale Daniher’s third act began. 

NEALE DANIHER:  I got passed the grieving fairly quickly because grieving don’t get you anywhere.

MATT TILLEY, FIGHTMND CEO: I 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.

ADAM HARVEY:  But Daniher did more than just about anyone focusing his tenacity on fundraisers that grabbed peoples’ attention raising around $140 million in donations. 

MATT TILLEY:  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.

ADAM HARVEY:  Driving it all Neale Daniher who eventually lost the ability to speak but could still send an email. 

MATT TILLEY:  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. 

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.

KEVIN SHEEDY:  Neale's a very tough person. He just looks a nice person, he's very tough. 

He will take anything on to think that it's worthwhile for our human race and he’s 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.