THERE’S a genuine delight when new Adelaide captain Taylor Walker spots his latest coach Phil Walsh. Walsh is sitting at a table in the large open-plan function room, which overlooks the gym at the club’s West Lakes base, and rises to greet the man he has chosen as his on-field leader for the new-look Crows.

The duo exchange a handshake, which morphs from the traditional to a more vertical street-style grip.

The first impression is that these are two blokes who are extremely comfortable in one another’s company.

Perhaps it’s the shared background. Both are country boys. Walsh is from Hamilton in western Victoria, while Walker hails from Broken Hill.

Maybe it’s because Walsh chose Walker to be his on-field lieutenant, a choice that confounded many at the time. It’s the sort of decision designed to build trust and confidence between two people.

Or possibly it’s just because they are both now holding positions very few expected they ever would. This time last year Walsh was working for Port Adelaide and Walker, having been out injured for a year, was still wondering whether his rebuilt knee would withstand the rigours of AFL football.

Whatever the connection, they appear close despite the 30-year age gap. Walsh is 54, making him the oldest first- time senior coach in more than a century of VFL-AFL history.

It’s a statistic which delights Walsh.

“A lot of my friends are about 55, and I’m about to turn 55,” he says. “They are all retiring and they are laughing at me, (saying) ‘you have taken the biggest job of your whole career and we are getting out’.’’

It’s odd to hear Walsh laugh.

The stereotype of the coach paints him as the ultra-intense, overly serious, football hard case who has little time for those who don’t share his world view. There is the notion he rules as much by fear as his well-acknowledged tactical genius and football brain. Now there is some truth in this. It’s just not the whole truth.

“I am portrayed that way,’’ he concedes. “But that’s not the real Phil Walsh.’’

Not that he’s “going to reveal exactly who I am”.

Footy clubs can be perplexing places to the outsider. A measure of mystique must be thrown into the mix.

On this day Walsh is welcoming, friendly, funny and curious. Although there is the sense occasionally when he fixes you with a stare and talks with vigour about the manner in which he expects his team to play, that he would also be a bad man to let down. Sitting beside him, his captain is also quick to defend Walsh from the dangers of media stereotyping.

“Don’t judge a book by its cover,’’ pipes up Walker, before expanding on his hypothesis, which turns out to be a favourite of his and one he returns to later in the conversation.

“That’s what happens when you are in the seat we are in,’’ Walker continues. “Everyone judges you a little bit more than you should be, I think. (The coach) is a perfect example. Behind here, he is a very, very funny guy.’’

Walker’s first exposure to Walsh was last year at the funeral of Dean Bailey. The popular Adelaide assistant was tragically taken by cancer 12 months ago and he and Walsh were close, having previously worked together at Port. Walsh’s eulogy at the service so inspired Walker that he “could have gone to war that day I reckon”.

“After that day I actually wanted to meet Phil,’’ he says.

The pair has a lot of work ahead to restore Adelaide’s on-field credibility. It’s been two long seasons since Adelaide last played finals footy. Indeed, in the past five years, the Crows have made the eight only once. It’s a lamentable record.

If you want to go further back, the Crows have not won a premiership, or even made a grand final, since the second of their consecutive flags in 1998. Given its playing stocks, fan base and status as the state’s biggest club, the past 16 years has been an era of stark underachievement for the Crows. Walsh is the latest in a line that includes sole Crows’ premiership coach Malcolm Blight, Gary Ayres, Neil Craig and Brenton Sanderson to seek the elusive third flag.

Walker will be 25 next month, but was only seven when Adelaide won its last flag and his memories of the event are hazy.

“I barracked for the Crows, I loved it,’’ he says. “I can’t even remember what it was like when I was seven.’’

This lack of success is one reason for the change at the top.

Walsh replaced Brenton Sanderson at the end of last season after two barren years, while Walker took over from Nathan van Berlo, a veteran who didn’t play a game last year because of injury. Both were surprise appointments. Indeed Walker admits he had to give careful consideration to accepting a job he knew would bring with it more scrutiny.

“When Phil first spoke to me I think I pretty much said no,’’ Walker says. “Then I slept on it.”

He canvassed family and friends, worried the burdens of office may have a detrimental effect on his footy and his broader life. He had also never been a captain at any level of the game. But in the end the challenge to revitalise the team he had supported since he was a kid was not one he could refuse.

“This opportunity will probably never, ever come up again, so why not?” he reasons.

It’s a reluctance Walsh can relate to.

Walsh has developed an enviable reputation in the game. He is the strategist, the thinker, the backroom player who constructs teams and philosophies away from the glare of the spotlight.

Most notably he was right-hand man to Port coach Mark Williams when the Power won the premiership in 2004.

Whenever he was asked, he always professed he had no ambition to become an AFL head coach.

But that was before Peru.

After each AFL season Walsh and his family travel overseas to recharge the batteries. In October 2012 he was in Cusco, Peru, with his wife Meredith and son Cy when he was cleaned up at a pedestrian crossing by a 12-seater mini-bus. He thought he was going to die. He was taken to hospital with a fractured pelvis and a broken collarbone. But lying there injured, he made a resolution.

“One of the things I said to myself as I was lying on the hospital bed in Peru was that if I ever got asked to apply for a senior job I would actually go through that process,” he says.

Walsh is open in describing it as a life-changing moment. Even today the screensaver on his computer shows the corner where he was hit. Just to remind himself that every day is precious and not to waste time.

It also helped teach him that there was more to life than football.

“There was a point in my life when football was more important than anything else, coaching in particular,’’ he says. “It is an intense way to find out about it, but that life experience has been really good for me and I think it has made me a better coach.”

It was a lesson reinforced last month when veteran Crows’ defender Brent Reilly was badly injured at training, fracturing his skull and putting him in intensive care.

Walsh reflected on how he may have handled that situation earlier in his career.

“When I was a young coach I was very intense, very judgmental,” he says. “An incident like that when it happened. I might have yelled something out on the field. I have a few rings on the tree now.

“What experience has taught me is that you take a pause before you say something. You take everything in, you are a little more calculated.’’

Where Walsh has done much of his maturing away from the public eye, Walker has had to cope with the expectations of an adoring fan base since he arrived in Adelaide from Broken Hill as a scholarship player in the 2007 draft.

Big forwards who kick goals hold a special place in the hearts of footy fans. They bring an excitement, a buzz of expectation that even the best midfielders can’t match. By common consensus they are also the hardest players to find and Walker was the Crows’ best prospect since the heady days of Tony Modra in the 1990s.

It was a stuttering start for Walker.

Then coach Neil Craig ignored the clamour and left him to play for Norwood in the SANFL, with only the occasional foray into the big time, before he was again returned to the Parade.

Craig told him while glamour forwards were all well and good, he needed to do more than just kick goals.

“When Craigy didn’t play me he didn’t think my defensive pressure was good enough, but I thought it was probably the best,’’ Walker says. “Now you look back on it, it was a great learning curve for me because now I think I’m at a standard which is consistent.’’

He was also becoming a public figure. Like every other young athlete he had a Twitter moment or two, sledged the odd journo, and had a mullet-growing competition with former teammate Ivan Maric. He caused an unwitting mini-storm when he was seen having a beer before a footy game in which he was not even playing. There is still the sense he’s not entirely comfortable in the spotlight and would prefer to stay away from the media as much as possible.

Asked if he would need to be a little more forthcoming now he is club captain, Walker’s first reaction is to address the coach and joke “we’ll keep the reins on that, I think” before giving the straight answer that he understands “being a captain that (media) comes with it and I’ll have to do a lot more for the footy club and for the team”.

The constant judgment from fans and media alike, especially in the modern social media world is something that leaves him bemused.

“This is what I find so funny about AFL,’’ he says. “How heavily criticised we are. But if I was to go into a cafe and the coffee was cold. You don’t say ‘what the f*** are you doing?’ On Saturday, if we miss a goal ‘you’re shit, get him off, don’t play him next week’. That’s what I find so funny about our game.”

At which point a laughing Walsh intervenes to point out that “people are more passionate about footy than coffee, mate, that’s all it is”.

Walker accepts the point and acknowledges “the industry we are in, you have to adapt to it, otherwise it chews you up and spits you out’’.

It’s refreshing to hear an AFL captain speak candidly about the pressure of the game and hopefully Walker doesn’t get that engagingly honest and open side of his character beaten out of him by the demands of the job and becomes just another bland voice among many sprouting well-rehearsed lines.

Walsh admits he will have to improve his presentation skills and perhaps do a better job of hiding obvious frustrations when asked what he considers daft questions at press conferences.

“I have to be a little more respectful when maybe I get… a question I think ‘come on, you have watched the game’,’’ he says. “I don’t have to say anything, you can tell by my body language ‘yeah, Phil doesn’t reckon that’s a real good question’. I’m working on it. It’s my first go at it like Tex (Walker). I’m not going to be the best in the business first-up.”

Walsh is a teacher by training, but played 122 games, mostly on the wing, in a career that took him to Collingwood, Richmond and the Brisbane Bears, where he won the new club’s first best and fairest. His coaching career has included time at Geelong and West Coast as well as Port.

In his playing days, footballers were still part-time. And while he says the game was more fun in his day he is envious that modern players have the capacity to extract every ounce of their potential if they want to. “These guys they can really be the best they can ever be. They can find out what that looks like,” he says.

And there is no question he is pushing them hard.

“If you want to take short cuts, if you want to do it your own way and not our way you won’t do it at this footy club,’’ he says.

For those who have watched Walsh from afar over the years, it still takes a little adjustment to see him looking comfortable in a Crows’ polo shirt. After all, this is a club he once said he would never work for.

But after a dismal 2014 season the Crows were the ones that came calling when they were looking for a new head coach. Last year, another new Crow in club chief executive Andrew Fagan described how Walsh had won the job.

As part of the interview process Walsh and two other candidates were asked to analyse a quarter of footy from a video and give feedback on strategy and tactics. All three were given half an hour to prepare, but Walsh offered to do it sight unseen.

“We said ‘all right then Phil, go for it’,’’ Fagan said at the time. “He said he was going to pretend he was sitting in the (coaches) box as senior coach and would call the game for us. “He proceeded to give us a 30-minute masterclass.’’ The job was his.

Walsh concedes the cross-town move may heighten the rivalry between the clubs but he dismisses any notion of discomfort, finding that once he became part of the inner sanctum he found “there is so much more to this club and this playing list than what I thought”.

He says he chose Walker as captain because he talked team rather than individual at their first meeting.

“As soon as I walked in here I probably spoke to everyone at the club and there was probably only two people that the first thing they spoke about was ‘you have to fix this team up, we could be really good’.’’

Walker was one of those. Everybody else wanted to ask Walsh what he thought of them as a player.

For his part, Walker says Walsh has brought “an edge of hardness, which we needed’’ to the club.

Walker didn’t make it on to the field until Round 9 last year as he fought his way back from a knee injury, and subsequent reconstruction, that he initially feared could end his career.

“When I first did it, I was like ‘I don’t think I will ever play again’. I was in a brace for four weeks, I couldn’t bend my knee, couldn’t move my leg.”

But as the weeks and months went by and the little milestones were achieved – running, kicking the football – he became confident that he would be back.

Although the fear that it could happen again never really leaves you.

“I still have a little bit of negative thoughts every now and again, but I suppose I will probably have them for the rest of my career,” he says.

For the moment though both Walker and Walsh are filled with enthusiasm and optimism. No games have been played, so no games have been lost and the season’s promise is still in full bloom.

Walsh, fresh from a season in which a resurgent Port Adelaide surprised everyone with its progress, is making no predictions for his new charges.

“Everything is a realistic possibility,’’ he says. “I am not going to put any limits on what this team can do.”