The what-ifs are plentiful for Essendon. But what if they’d hired Neale Daniher?

The story of how Essendon spurned Damien Hardwick, whose coaching presentation to the hierarchy was compromised by a malfunctioning computer, has become one of the innumerable what-ifs for the Bombers over the past 19 years.

Here’s a small sample: What if they’d drafted Joel Selwood (bad knee in his draft year) instead of Scott Gumbleton (perennially injured post-draft)? What if they’d never hired Stephen Dank? What if they’d coughed up two first rounders and landed Josh Dunkley when he wanted to become a Don?

Much as the non-hiring of triple premiership coach Hardwick has become folkloric for the frustrated red and black congregation – a section of which are lusting for the second coming of their Messiah – it is easily forgotten that another Essendon Person, or EP, was overlooked in the coach search that settled on Matthew Knights ahead of Hardwick.

Neale Daniher was a candidate to coach the club for which he starred for his first three years, and which he captained in 1982 without tossing the coin once due to the first of a succession of knee injuries that made him a James Dean figure for the Bombers, a gifted player cut down in his prime.

Daniher’s inability to secure a second crack at coaching is now accepted as an AFL industry failure; his record of six finals series in nine-and-a-half seasons, at a club with terrible facilities, scant resources and internal dysfunction, would come to be viewed as exceptional in the circumstances.

The British historian David Runciman recently rolled out an entire series of “counterfactuals” on his podcast, such as “what if the French Revolution had happened in China?” and “what if the Berlin Wall hadn’t fallen?”

Today, as Kevin Sheedy campaigns for James Hird’s contentious/redemptive return, arguing that the Essendon coaching position should be occupied by an EP, it’s worth considering another counterfactual that might have changed the course of Essendon history: What if the Bombers had hired Neale Daniher in 2007?

Sheedy favoured Daniher then, but the club board wanted to move past the marathon Sheedy era and into the future. As an Essendon board member from that time recalled on Monday, the hierarchy “wanted a younger coach to connect with young blokes.” Knights had coached their VFL affiliate, the Bendigo Bombers, which they felt was a good grounding.

There was a view that Daniher, whose stocks were not as high as they subsequently became – Melbourne’s repeated failures after 2007 forced a reinterpretation of his tenure – would be an authoritarian coach, not dissimilar to Sheedy.

But “the Reverend” Danih