Born in 1960, Walsh grew up in Hamilton in rural Victoria, loved his cricket, tennis, basketball - and, of course, football.

News of Walsh’s tragic murder early today has shocked the AFL community and left them mourning an identity who rose to the game’s top levels from humble beginnings.

Last year, his sister Marie told The Advertiser Walsh was ‘a normal country kid’ who was ‘always playing footy in the back yard, broadcasting to himself’.

Even then, he dreamed of a big future.

“He’d be running around, kicking the ball and saying he was somebody or other on the footy ground”, Marie recalled.

Then at 22, his sporting career in the bush took on a much larger dimension when Walsh was noticed by Collingwood.

In 1983, he won the equivalent of the Rising Star award in his first season with the VFL.

That made him a poaching target for Richmond, and then he moved north to Brisbane to play with the old Brisbane Bears.

In 1987 he picked up the Bears inaugural Best and Fairest Award, an honour which reflected his personal style.

All-up, Walsh played more than 120 games for three clubs - but half of those were for the Bears.

The next 30 years saw Walsh finesse his coaching skills, working as an assistant coach at Port Adelaide and West Coast before returning to Port.

Phil Walsh - a career in pictures

Then, last year, Walsh secured the top coaching role at the Adelaide Crows, a career highlight that saw him finally move from skilled apprentice to master of his craft.

Walsh was the first to admit the coaching gig had been a long time coming.

In April this year, he told Fox Footy’s On the Couch that it had been a ‘long journey’ to the senior coach role ‘particularly after he was hit by a school bus while travelling in Peru’.

The Peru trip - which he took with his wife Meredith and son Cy - was in line with a passion for travelling at the end of every season to recharge his batteries.

Instead, this trip almost killed him, leaving him with a broken pelvis and collarbone.

“I probably wondered if I’d ever get back top Australia. I probably made a promise to myself that if I ever did get the opportunity to interview for a senior coach’s job I’d take it”, he told Fox.

Walsh estimated he’d spent 10,000 hours in a coaches box over the past two decades.

This season had not been good to Walsh. It started off well, and the first two rounds took the Crows to the top of the AFL ladder. Then momentum slowed and more recently the club found itself about mid-way in the competition.

“(The starts) are a major frustration to us. It is the role of the coaches to get the players in the mindset for a fierce contest — and we were not ready for that (on Saturday night)”, he said just last week.

“Everyone is accountable,” added Walsh referring to how he would put himself under scrutiny for Adelaide’s bad openings.

Crows fans, though, remained confident of Walsh’s ability to deliver a finals berth, bolstered by come-from-behind wins.

For his former fans at Port, the Crows’ gain was very much their loss - he was always credited with being the game-day genius who pulled big moves that won matches for Port and when he left, so did their confidence.