The nature of the early morning discussions say plenty about the radical changes that have taken place at Windy Hill since Knights was installed in a decision that came as a shock to the AFL community on the eve of the 2007 grand final.

The Horsburgh-Sheedy breakfasts took place at one of Melbourne's more public morning meeting spots, South Yarra's Botanical Hotel. The chairman and the rookie coach meet a short-walking distance from the club in Napier Street.

The Sheedy meetings saw Horsburgh often telling the veteran coach not to become distracted by the looming contract showdown, and that concentrating on coaching would give him his best chance of remaining. There was also plenty of long-term financial advice.

With Knights, the advice is totally different and, according to Horsburgh, not necessarily taken on board. "It's more along lifestyle lines with Matthew," Horsburgh told The Sunday Age. "Last season I obviously wanted to reinforce his resolve during the tough period, but I also tried to get him to take more time-off.

"I tell him to spend more time with his kids, take one day off during the week, but I'm not sure he actually takes my advice. He's a pretty intense person."

The manner in which Knights won the right to succeed the club's longest-serving coach also provides a telling history lesson in the transformation in off-field recruiting, an osmosis which saw the younger man undergo a six-week process punctuated by intensive psychological testing and three separate three-hour presentations. Clubs did things differently 28 years ago.

Essendon under Sheedy had become used to playing finals until his last years, and Knights did not - despite what was said later about how he won the job - whitewash the situation at the football club once the real business of coaching was put to him by the board.

"I did not pull any punches about the direction the club needed to go," Knights says now. "I spoke my mind, which was the right thing to do. Then getting the tick from the Essendon footy club meant I was able to make the big decisions on staff and players."

Those big decisions included seven changes to the Bombers' football department which took a year to implement, and culminated with the departure after a decade of the club's key fitness and conditioning team headed by John Quinn, who has been replaced by Stuart Cormack, formerly of the Eagles.

Knights is diplomatic about Quinn, but the truth is that the two disagreed on important aspects of fitness. Quinn's concentration on trackwork has now been reduced and the 2009 pre-season has seen an increase in work on rowing machines and bikes, and a revised weights program. The decision to replace Quinn was made by the coach alone.

Just as Knights impressed the board before he won the job by pointing out that individual players must be treated as such - Essendon's indigenous players were a key factor in that - Cormack has designed a wellness program creating specific programs for specific players.

When Essendon insiders who have witnessed the post-Sheedy revolution are questioned about the changes under Knights, their simplest explanation is that players know now the task they will be handed well before each game. By the previous Tuesday in fact. But it goes much deeper than that.

Essendon had no true development coach before Knights took over, but now the club's extensive list of first- to fourth-year players spend an entire day each week concentrating on the off-field aspects of their job under Alan Richardson, one of several new faces Knights has managed to lure to Windy Hill, and to whom he insists he is learning to delegate better.

Richardson's enlistment from Collingwood was a project embarked upon by Knights some 15 months ago. He had been coaching Coburg in the VFL when Knights, the player, was dropped by then-Richmond coach Danny Frawley, and the Bombers coach has never forgotten how impressed he was by him.

And his lieutenants are not all new faces to Essendon. The first telephone call Knights made after he had been appointed as senior coach was to Gary O'Donnell to convince him to remain the No.1 assistant, the explanation being: "He was loyal to Kevin and I knew he'd be loyal to me."

Paul Hamilton has become football operations manager and another former Bomber David Calthorpe has returned to run the more basic team management aspects. The latter's irreverent but clever sense of humour has proved, according to colleagues, the light to Knights' shade.

The word intense comes up a lot when talking about Knights, the former Richmond captain who led the team during one patch of the Tigers' long and most recent history of failure, now stretching more than a quarter of a century. Knights was one of Richmond's notable few players of genuine class during that time, but his playing career did not end particularly happily.

Dropped to the reserves towards the end of his career - something Sheedy avoided, choosing instead to retire - replaced as captain and then forcibly retired, Knights moved to Adelaide in search of an extended football career and became coach of the Port Adelaide Magpies in the SANFL.

His intensity during his two years with the Magpies proved to be his undoing, something Knights freely admits, along with the fact he was at cross purposes with the board from the start, as it turned out. The club was keen to return to the success it enjoyed before Port Adelaide became an AFL club, and to spend money on established players, whereas Knights wanted to rebuild the list from the ground up.

It was at the end of his second unhappy season there that he received what he now describes as one of the most important telephone calls of his life - when Paul Barnard rang and suggested Knights apply for the Bendigo Bombers' VFL coaching job. He won the position from a panel that included Kevin Sheedy and Mark Harvey.

"I was too intense and inflexible and I constantly clashed heads with the board at Port Adelaide," Knights says now. "Myself and the board were at different directions as to where we saw the club going and I didn't handle it well.

"Coaching the Port Adelaide Magpies taught me that to be totally focused on footy is fine, but not to live with it 24-7. Not to bring it home every night to the family and not to lose sight of the creative element of coaching - to enjoy the ride. I think I've got better at that."

So much so, says Knights, that during the darkest hours of his AFL coaching debut season he honestly never struggled with the win-loss ratio or the thrashings that, despite his and CEO Peter Jackson's denials, did raise the eyebrows of club directors at one board meeting in 2008.

The new-look James Hird-less Bombers had won two of their first three games under Knights at the start of the season, before losing eight in succession. As Knights has said, it is true that there was no special meeting called and no finger-pointing. But it was briefly pointed out around May or early June, after yet another final-quarter capitulation, that the team could not keep conceding late goals in games at the current rate.

"Certainly those losses were difficult, but I was honestly in the throng of enjoying my work and enjoying the challenges, and Peter Jackson and Ray Horsburgh were always supportive," says Knights. "It was an eerie time, but I never felt threatened and the plan never changed. We are still very young and that was exposed around stoppages - we knew why it was happening.

"Still it was good for our supporters when things improved and they could see some light."

In 2009, Knights will raise eyebrows with a tall forward structure including Matthew Lloyd, Scott Lucas, Jay Neagle and Scott Gumbleton, whose anticipated return after spending his first two seasons on the sidelines was underlined at the start of spring-summer training with a 15.4 beep test.

"Throw in Adam McPhee and David Hille, who goes forward a bit, and I guess we'll resemble a tall timber forest, but I'll stick to it because we've just got to get games into Neagle and Gumbleton," said Knights. "I know it's left of centre and it will be 10 or 15 games before you might see some progress, but in the short term I'm not interested in their form because in the long term I know it's the right thing to do."

Horsburgh rates Knights' performance in his rookie season an eight out of 10, losing points only for not making the finals - which no one expected anyway. Most senior people at Essendon expect the coach to be offered a contract extension at the end of 2009. Knights, not surprisingly, is less bullish regarding his rating.

"I saw at Richmond where the president and the coach did not agree on the coach's rating, so maybe I should go with Ray," he jokes. "When you look at win-loss performance alone, I could only say middle-rank - about five out of 10 - but I have been happy with a lot of what we've achieved in terms of development.

"I am also a lot more transparent now. When I meet the Essendon board every month, I tell them anything and everything. At Port Adelaide I tended to hold things back. And I am getting better at delegating. I didn't do enough of that last season."

Despite Horsburgh's misgivings, Knights says he is still improving in that area. The Bombers' recent training camp at Coffs Harbour saw the coach hand one day each to assistants O'Donnell, Scott Camporeale, Adrian Hickmott, Ashley Prescott and Richardson.

Of the advantages of delegation, Knights said: "I was able to sit back and concentrate on strategy."

In fact, the entire camp consisted largely of strategic planning both on and off the field for 2009, and Knights' thoughts when he returns to work tomorrow after a 10-day Christmas-New Year break have not deviated much from where he saw the team structure at the start of the pre-season.

Knights spent his short holiday with his family at Mildura and admitted that, amid the relentless regime that is AFL coaching, 10 days away from it seemed like a very long time.

Horsburgh would be pleased to know that as recently as two days ago Knights spent the majority of his waking hours playing bowling machine to his young son's bat and the protective helmet the young Knights received for Christmas.

And the chairman who is hoping he will not be forever remembered as the man who sacked Kevin Sheedy wouldn't be surprised to learn that Knights was at work today, having quietly let himself in to his relatively small Windy Hill office to prepare for "Day One 2009". Tomorrow.

MATTHEW KNIGHTS ON:

KEVIN SHEEDY

"I've read bits of his book in the papers. He's got every right to have opinions, although I'd never heard any suggestions that Matthew Lloyd would be traded and I was around at the time. I probably didn't think that was warranted, although it didn't concern me that much. I want to be able to see Kevin and enjoy his company and enjoy his thoughts on footy and that's my only concern.

"I think it's great for the Richmond Football Club that he's gone back to Tigerland and I don't see it as any comment on Essendon. I see him as endeavouring to give the Essendon Football Club some space and give me some time."


ANDREW LOVETT

"Andrew is living in a townhouse in South Melbourne on his own and we meet every two weeks to talk about his progress and other things. Deciding whether or not to trade him was one of the toughest decisions I've had to make here. I've ended careers of some good people who wanted to play on like Damien Peverill, and you're breaking their heart, but with Andrew if we could have done a trade and it was suitable, it would have happened. But he's stayed and he is a very smart footballer, and he's finally starting to speak up in some of our footy sessions. He's starting to win back some respect from the playing group, but he's got a long way to go there."

MATTHEW LLOYD

"Matthew is our captain and will continue to be our captain. He's spoken to me quite seriously about his future and he really wants to dip his toe into the media this year and he'll do that with our blessing. I know he's one player who can get the balance right and I trust him to do that."

KYLE REIMERS

"Kyle needed to learn about the AFL. Some of the things he says to me as coach I never would have said to my coach, and he told me back in October he's planning on wearing a new colour of boots this season, but let's face it ... they're just boots. We celebrate Kyle's eccentricity, and I must say I enjoy coaching loveable rogues and I enjoy the fact we've got some interesting characters among our playing group."

RAY HORSBURGH ON MATTHEW KNIGHTS

"I'd give him an eight out of 10 for his first year. His ability to bring people along with his plan - his communication style has been terrific. He's very blunt and there's no game-playing. He addresses the board for half an hour to 40 minutes once a month and his resolve has never changed. He's a pretty intense sort of person. If anything, he's even more emphatic now about sticking to his long-term plan than he was last year."

The only small black mark against Matthew Knights, is keeping faith in that little turd, Andrew Lovett - but I'm prepared to back the Coach in. It sure would have been fantastic had we traded Love-Myself-Lovey-Boy, but then again if no one wanted Andrew, wake up to yourself young man & repay the faith!

BRING on Round 1...

Cheers,

Christos Bomberopoulos