At face value, Joe Daniher is straight off the footballing peg. He’s 201cm, an excellent mark, a thumping kick and moves like a gazelle. If he was a yearling at the sales, they’d have taken one look at his bloodlines and his physical scope, and paid record prices for him.

But in the space of a game, in the space of a quarter, sometimes in the same passage of play, he’ll veer from the sublime to the farcical; from the totally inept to eye-poppingly good. Sometimes he’ll dominate a game from the opening whistle. Sometimes he’ll barely be present. Sometimes he’ll drift in and out of a game, like a cat hopping on a lap.

The football world has never quite known what to make of him. There’s a cottage industry of former champion forwards in the media who have always marked him harshly. He doesn’t fit the bill. He’s too casual. He doesn’t seem to care enough. And he doesn’t give them anything.

What makes him all the more frustrating and inscrutable is that he always exudes the same body language – whether he’s thwacking a goal from the boundary line or kicking sideways from the top of the goal square. Win or lose, big haul or bagel, he’ll chew his gum, shrug his shoulders, decline the interview and drive the two or so hours back to his home in the Byron Bay hinterland.

Only a certain type of coach could handle a player like that. “You need to say to someone like him, ‘Joe. We’ll wear your odd mistake,’” Leigh Matthews said on Footy Furnace several weeks ago. “‘You’ll make a bad decision every now and then.’ Because he’s an instinctive player. I heard people critiquing the coach saying, ‘he hasn’t been coached hard enough.’ But if Joe gets scared of making mistakes, and if we keep talking about what he’s not good at, he’ll lose confidence in himself.”

Matthews was always someone who could adapt his coaching to different personalities. He knew which players would respond to a bake, and which ones would capitulate. And he knew which players had to rigidly adhere to his systems and structures, and which ones had to be left to play on instinct.

At both Collingwood and Brisbane, he was also fiercely loyal to players who had performed for him in finals. That’s where Daniher has always excelled and where he’s earned his own coach Chris Fagan’s trust and forgiveness. Even at Essendon, he saved his best for the Anzac Day and Dreamtime at the ’G matches. For Brisbane, he scrambled the winning goal in the 2022 elimination final, was their best player in last year’s qualifying final, booted two crucial goals when the preliminary final was up for grabs and had the better of the All-Australian captain in the 2023 grand final.

The full gamut was on display in the semi-final against GWS Giants on Saturday night – the early miss, the wraparound handball from a Josh Dunkley set shot that he sent sailing out on the full, the field kick halfway through the final term where he U-turned and kicked it straight to his direct opponent. His coach chewed his gum a little more furiously, presumably thinking, “I could be at home with my grandkids building cubby houses rather than dealing with this bullshit, Joe.”

But in the madness of those final minutes, Daniher was the one who kept his cool. He found himself in the gutter, on the wrong side for a left-footer. When golfers hit a draw, they close their clubface more than usual and Daniher’s set shot, on a squally nigh, was the perfect draw. A few minutes later, he got separation from one of the best defenders in the game, Sam Taylor, and launched himself sideways. A month earlier against Collingwood, his tardy kicking arguably cost them the double chance. Now he’d put the Lions into a preliminary final.

Normally he projects a laconic air. But there he was, pumping his fists, screaming at his teammates. Then, in a rare interview, with players and spectators surely unable to process what had just happened, he was the only one making a syllable of sense. Just when you’ve given up on him, just when you think you’re out, he pulls you back in. Dwayne Russell, a considerably more excitable individual, called him “the sickness and the cure”. Such is the Joe Daniher experience.

• This is an extract from Guardian Australia’s free weekly AFL email, From the Pocket. To get the full version, just visit this page and follow the instructions