Essendon held firm on the contracted Joe Daniher last night and their attention now turns to convincing him it is the place to be.

Adrian Dodoro revealed he and Daniher had a lengthy conversation before the trade deadline on the very topic.

“We’ve already made contact with Joe and his family and we will continue to do that. The great thing is every single player at the club is rapt that he is staying and have reached out. He’ll have the love and support of everyone at the club,” he told SEN Breakfast.

“We had a conversation prior to the deadline with Joey last night. We were probably on the phone for about 40 minutes.

“He does not have an issue with anyone at the Essendon Football Club. I’m sure that he will come out and talk in time.

“It’s about lifestyle for him and wanting to change environments – that’s our reading of it.”

Dodoro said they were never going to accept a deal that didn’t feature a player coming back their way.

“We were open minded about it, there’s no doubt about it, we didn’t want to lose him, but we had to be realistic that if a good offer was presented to us, we needed to look at it very seriously,” he said.

“The narrative around five and nine is interesting. We went into these negotiations with Sydney and they were all respectful and at no stage did discussions become nasty on either part, but we made it very clear to the Swans that we needed to have players involved, we just had to.

“We spent years trying to put our team together, our list demographic, our age demographic, to give ourselves an opportunity to start playing in finals.

“Now, certainly we have a long way to go and we don’t want to go backwards, we want to go forwards, and for us to go forwards, draft picks at this point weren’t going to help us.

“We needed to replenish our team with quality players to give ourselves that opportunity.

“The media was speculating that nine and five were compelling picks. We made it clear we weren’t interested in nine and five, we wanted players.

“Their final offer was selection nine and a future first-round pick and that wasn’t good enough. We made it clear what we needed.

“It’s not personal, at the end of the day, the club comes first.”

Listen to Adrian Dodoro on SEN Breakfast