LATE on a Friday afternoon midway through the 1986 season, a very young football reporter on the old Sun News-Pictorial was desperately and fruitlessly scratching around for news.

Suddenly, the phone rang and the gods smiled. "Sheedy here. I've left you a tape downstairs. Watch it and ring me back." I sprinted down three flights, the names Woodward, Bernstein and Nixon racing around my head. When the tape was thrust into the office VCR, things became clear.

Essendon was coming off consecutive premierships, but the best and toughest team in the competition was beginning to wilt. The Bombers were being hit harder and more often. The five-minute montage featured various Essendon stars getting cleaned up by a variety of opponents without penalty.

Kevin Sheedy barely let the phone ring before he answered, formalities dispensed with. "We're sick of it," he bellowed. "At the moment it's just get an Essendon head and knock it in. From now on, it's open slather. I don't know how long I can hold them (the players) back."

Great copy, splashed all over the back page the following morning. Desperate to goad his troops into a backs-to-the-wall mentality, Sheedy knew precisely the right buttons to push.

He always has — the quips, asides and quotable quotes flying thick and fast yesterday at a news conference conducted under more personally trying circumstances than perhaps thousands of similar throngs he had fronted before.

Sheedy will be remembered as an innovative and ground-breaking coach with a flair for thinking outside the square. He marketed his club brilliantly, pushing its and his agendas relentlessly. And the media provided the perfect conduit.

Sheedy worked the fourth estate effortlessly to spread his message, whether to players, administrators or board members.

Otherwise, it was as a means of letting his opponents know that he and his team were up and about, or to push the AFL in areas he believed needed prodding. Every bit as significantly, it was to talk to the supporter base he was trying to satisfy.

"I always get on well with the fans because I'm probably a fans' sort of footy coach," he summed up during what was another consummate performance yesterday. "When I try to talk to the media, it's about talking to the fans, not just the media, because you people relay that message."

Sheedy made it his business to know plenty about those spreading it. He would grill reporters as often as they grilled him, always looking for some scrap of information from or about them which might prove handy.

Any newcomer to a Sheedy news conference was inevitably quizzed about his or her background, which team they supported, what they thought about this topic or that. He would ring them at home late at night to get the lowdown on a player they had seen run around in another side's seemingly meaningless intra-club practice match.

It must be said that he was much better at getting the answers he wanted from them than they could glean from him — sometimes unwittingly, more often quite deliberately.

As a "ghost" for Sheedy's Age column in the late 1980s, I spent many afternoons scratching my head trying to work out just what he was going on about, the initial premise for an article lost in several different tangents. They were never boring ones, mind you.

That was the same lateral thinking that served his teams so well, but the tangents came in pretty handy when the heat was on, too.

His capacity to deflect attention or escape tackling the hard questions when he or Essendon were under the pump became legendary, partly because the diversions he would produce were so often thought-provoking or plain newsworthy in their own right.

More interchange players. Changes to the rules. Proposals for summits. Relief for endangered Victorian clubs. Left-field ideas about recruiting, development, strategy. Home-spun philosophy on people, politics, life in general. Name a topic and Sheedy inevitably had a theory.

Then there were those great media "grabs", such as the reference to umpires as Martians, which deftly avoided a fine, or the "marshmallow war" of 1998 when Sheedy targeted rival North Melbourne officials.

Walk away from any Sheedy news conference and you had a story. True, it could have absolutely no relevance to a humiliating defeat his team had just suffered, but a guaranteed headline nonetheless.

He'll continue to provide them whether he remains coaching or takes on one of the many ambassador-type roles he's been offered over the years. But of all jobs Sheedy could do, none would come as naturally as one in the media.

His knowledge of the game, the clubs and his players has always been acute. But when it comes to that section of the industry that has helped spread his gospel, Sheedy possibly knows us better than we know ourselves.