The two men who have taken on doing that are very different but they have one thing in common: neither is nervous about it.

After close to 40 years of politics in all its forms — 18 of those in the Canberra bear pit – Lindsay Tanner is unfazed about Essendon’s four-year ordeal and the problems it left behind.

“Crisis is situation normal for me,” says the man who took over as president from the bullet-scarred Paul Little some 18 months ago.

TIMELINE: HOW THE ESSENDON DRUGS SAGA UNFOLDED

“My background was unusually relevant. One skill in politics is to know which balls to let go through to the keeper. Keep your eyes on the primary objective and don’t let unpleasant stuff distract you.”

The former Cabinet Minister knows there are things he doesn’t know, so he will concentrate on board room decisions and leave the football to the experts.

In this case, that means John Worsfold, the hired gun from the west with a brief to clean up Dodge.

Tanner promised Worsfold if he broke his self-imposed silence on players and tactics he expected to be set straight immediately.

So far, the arrangement is working beautifully.

The man the football world calls “Woosher” is sitting in his office overlooking one of the most beautiful sights in Football Inc – the view from the window of his upper-floor office above the club’s training centre at Tullamarine.

It is only a few kilometres and a few years past the dank, dark corners of Windy Hill with its rickety stand, its sorrows and its secrets, but on a good day the modern club headquarters is a world away. As impressive – and fit for purpose – as any in the land.

When the sun comes out and the wind doesn’t, the immaculate turf looks as inviting as a new billiard table.

The spectacular “hangar” flanking the administration block – designed by noted architect (and Essendon life member) Daryl Jackson AO – is not just symbolic but practical. So is the vast upstairs gymnasium that looks into it through high windows.

The gym is three times the size of the old one at Windy Hill, which means the entire squad can now work out together instead of doing weights in shifts.

Then there are the rowing machines and stationary bikes in the “altitude room”, which dilutes oxygen to mimic training somewhere in the Andes.

There’s an auditorium underneath where no sound intrudes to distract players from the coach’s message.

It’s so secure the CIA could use it (although, in fact, the Australian Paralympic Committee shares the facility, which explains the wheelchair skid marks on the basketball court.)

The indoor training spaces, the airy offices and the big merchandise shop don’t guarantee success but, taken together, they provide a fertile ground.

It is “green shoots on the Nullarbor stuff,” under the stewardship of a man who spent many footy seasons flying over that particular desert until he finally got the chance to stay in the east.

For Worsfold, the novelty of Essendon’s new home has worn off but he says the facility matches or beats anything that other clubs have – including his old West Coast training quarters, now half a generation behind.

He happily shows off the place while he talks about the job ahead.

The club’s philosophies are nailed to the wall.

One is the quotation from former captain and premiership ruckman Simon Madden, emblazoned in huge letters: “We are all custodians of this great club and we are just passing through.”

In the auditorium there’s more motivational hype in end-of-the-world type: “We are a high-scoring team that is ruthless in defence and uncompromising in the contest.”

No arguments about that aim – but it’s easier said than done.

Worsfold doesn’t blather or bluster or hide behind jargon – probably one reason that players both sides of Australia are so fond of him.

He is frank about where Essendon is – and isn’t.

So a diplomatic suggestion that his team’s good start to the season hit “a couple of hiccups” gets an honest response.

“It’s a matter of perspective,” he says.

“Is it a good start with hiccups – or an unbelievable start, then back to normal?”

He’s not posing a question so much as making the point that Essendon has more to worry about than box office receipts when it plays Collingwood in the Anzac Day blockbuster this week.

But there’s good news, too.

He suggests Carlton is better than most Essendon fans want to admit. And Adelaide stands out (with Greater Western Sydney) in an otherwise even competition, a legitimate flag favourite. Which Essendon and Collingwood are not.

A few days before what promises to be an evenly-matched middleweight clash between two battlers, Worsfold is as cool as he ever was on the ground plying his trade of unnerving opposition forwards.

As a player for 12 years and a coach for another 12 – including eight finals games and a premiership – he never struck anyone as the nervy type.

If he struck anyone, as he sometimes did in the line of duty, he wasn’t at all nervous about it. Clinical and ruthless are the sort of words people use about the toughest pharmacist to play the game.

As a coach, he’s happy to let his record speak rather than talk up the club or himself.

“It was a wonderful start but at least two games have brought us back to reality,” he says.

After the first two wins of the season – against Hawthorn and Brisbane – it looked as if the Bombers were emerging from dark days with a heightened sense of relief and optimism.

Simon Madden said of those wins: “One swallow doesn’t make a summer – but geez that was a big swallow.”

But that was a fortnight ago.

As Lindsay Tanner knows, a week is a long time in politics and football, and two weeks is twice as long.

Two straight losses – and Hawthorn’s rapid slide from old champ to easybeat – has cooled any wild optimism Essendon supporters entertained after the two opening rounds.

For Worsfold and Tanner and co., the team has survived the war but now has to win the peace.

If one thing sums up Worsfold’s poker-faced attitude to coaching, it was his post-game press conference less than an hour after his Eagles lost the 2005 grand final to Sydney by a tiny margin.

Asked how he would recover from the narrow loss, Worsfold shrugged.

“I’ll be over it by tomorrow, ready to prepare and go forward,” he said. Sure enough, the next season, his team won.

It’s that sort of nerve that Lindsay Tanner and the Essendon brains trust wanted at the controls after the Dank-Hird horror show.

But nerve alone isn’t enough.

The coach has to be many things: mentor, amateur psychologist, father figure or “big brother” to individual players. Part friend, part dictator.

Some coaches have a “Mr Chips” quality that makes players want to please them the way pupils are inspired by great teachers.

It’s a mix of charisma and character that differs from coach to coach and can’t be learned or taught, only refined.

Tanner and his board see that quality in Worsfold and backed it, the way the Bulldogs did with Luke Beveridge.

For Tanner, who shelved his ambition to be Prime Minister after the rise of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, heading Essendon promises to deliver a lifelong ambition: he wants to meet club legend Ronnie Andrews, now a country bus driver who never has trouble from passengers.

The meeting of great Essendon minds didn’t happen all last season and it won’t be happening on Tuesday.

The man that opposition fans called “Rotten Ronnie” won’t make it to the MCG on Anzac Day because he has an appointment with a Murray Cod north of Mildura.

He will be in a tinny – and possibly sinking a few of the same – in a river somewhere.

Tanner will reach out to him when the cod stop biting.

He himself was hooked by the Bombers when he was a small boy at Orbost in East Gippsland. He rarely got to see them play while he was at school, so when he moved to Melbourne for university in 1974, he deliberately rented in the heart of Essendon territory so he could walk to Windy Hill.

He admits the main attraction of that first season was watching Andrews, the hard man the opposition loved to hate, lumbering down the ground and scaring off tacklers with the constant threat of violence.

Apart from attending every home and away game – he would go early enough to watch the reserves, as well – Tanner attended Bombers training nights right through the season.

A devotion that borders on obsession.

Tanner speculates that in a perverse way, Essendon players have a psychological edge – by contrast with the dark days, playing footy is fun and games for them.

This law of unexpected consequences also applies to the suspension of established senior players because it let a heap of keen youngsters into the squad, still with the raw enthusiasm that can be dulled by the pressure cooker of professional sport.

“It has turbocharged six or seven players” says Tanner.

They have blossomed with experience but without being under the same weight of expectation as most AFL players.

They are not top draft picks, not senior stars on big money. They are freshly-elevated and young: uninhibited, grateful and hungry to grab the chance the footy gods tossed their way.

You can’t fake that sort of exuberance, which is why little players like Anthony McDonald-Tipungwuti, Orazio Fantasia and Travis Colyer will win huge applause at the MCG on Tuesday – win, lose or draw.

Applause at the MCG is no novelty for Jack Jones, at 92 the oldest and most highly-decorated Essendon veteran still around the club.

Jones got his chance with the Bombers after his army mates reported that he dominated scratch games played to fill in four months stuck on Bougainville Island after World War II ended in August 1945.

By that time Jones, had already served the previous year in the New Guinea jungles as a 19-year-old.

The Ascot Vale butcher would go on to play in seven Grand Finals and three premierships, much of it beside the great John Coleman.

He is probably the only VFL player ever to miss two games with malaria.

Last Thursday morning, with his medals on his blazer and a shine on his shoes, the grand old man of Bomberland took seven first-season players to the Shrine to explain a few things.

On Anzac Day he will hand the match balls to the umpires in front of probably 90,000 people, which is a sobering thought. Because that’s the same number of Australians who have died in wars.