As one of Australian football’s shrewdest characters, Malthouse dodged more bullets than any coach in the game’s history, perhaps other than his contemporary Kevin Sheedy.

By his own admission, he possessed an astute antenna for boardroom angst.

That’s why he knew 2015 was a make-or-break season for him at Carlton — his third season at his fourth AFL club as coach.

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The Blues had made the finals in Malthouse’s first season in 2013, courtesy of Essendon’s drugs disqualification, but the weight of injuries and inconsistent form saw them plummet to 13th the following season.

But even though he was on the verge of breaking Jock McHale’s longstanding VFL-AFL games coaching record, a chat with chief executive Steven Trigg in January 2015 convinced him his coaching career was on borrowed time.

“I am not that clever, but I do know (it’s troubling) when … sometime in January the CEO, Steven Trigg, comes to me and he says to me, ‘Now, if a bus hits you tomorrow, who would be the coach?’,” Malthouse told the Sacked podcast.

“I thought, ‘Well, there it is … that’s the first sign’.

“I gave him (Trigg) an answer and it wasn’t what he thought it should be. I said ‘Rob Wiley’, and he said: ‘Why?’ I said ‘He is my deputy’, there is a fair chance you would put your deputy in.”

The conversation didn’t last long, but it was enough to alert Malthouse to the fact that even though he was contracted, he might not see out the season.

As Malthouse speaks, four years on, he is remarkably sanguine about how the end came at Carlton, happy to reveal the details of those turbulent days at Princes Park without bile or malice.

If you sense lingering animosity over his time at Collingwood and how it ended, he is genuinely reflective rather than furious at the only true sacking in his coaching career.

But he acknowledged when the two men who had appointed him — president Stephen Kernahan and chief executive Greg Swann — were replaced, he knew it was trouble.

Those who had taken on their roles — Mark LoGiudice and Trigg — were hardly glowing in their endorsement.

“You lose your president and your CEO, and straight away you are on borrowed time, because you are not (the replacements’) first choice,” Malthouse recalled.

Three losses came at the start of the 2015 season before a win over St Kilda in Round 4.

Then came Malthouse’s 715th game as coach, on a night in which he broke McHale’s record, but his old side Collingwood smashed the Blues by 75 points.

Two of the next three losses were by 70-plus points, including a near 13-goal drubbing by Geelong.

His wife, Nanette, alerted him to a conversation she had had with Trigg, suggesting another big loss could bring his tenure to a head.

“I can’t remember if it was after the Geelong game but it was after a game (around that time),” he said.

“I am not sticking up for Steven Trigg one little bit, but maybe it was the emotion after a game, or they may have been sitting in the stands together.”

Quizzed if he thought it was unusual for a CEO to speak so candidly to a coach’s wife, Malthouse said: “I would have thought so.”

REBUILD OR RESHAPE

The chasm between the coach and the president/CEO centred on the playing list — and how best to fix it.

Malthouse urged a similar pathway to ones he had charted at Footscray, West Coast and Collingwood, blending a mix of experience and youth.

LoGiudice and Trigg wanted a more radical approach, publicly advocating a rebuild.

LoGiudice even refused to rule out possible trades for Marc Murphy and Bryce Gibbs.

“First and foremost, I wanted to keep the key players, not to be sold off, which was one thing that was sort of suggested,” Malthouse said.

“The last thing I wanted any of my players to hear was that we were starting afresh … what does (veteran) Kade Simpson do … or what does Chris Judd do? You have to give your players hope.

“The club was pretty big on going to the press … with, ‘We’re down the bottom, we’re going to start afresh’.

“Regardless of whether I respect them, I respect the opinion that I wanted to go that way, and the club said, ‘No, we are going that way’.”

He conceded he and LoGiudice “don’t have a great relationship … we have absolutely no relationship at all.

“That suits me down to the ground and it probably suits him down to the ground too … I couldn’t see where he was coming from at all.”

Carlton was anchored to the bottom after Round 8 — with one win and seven losses.

Malthouse’s coaching career was now being measured in hours.

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WALK THE PLANK

Malthouse would regularly walk the 5.5km from his family’s East Melbourne apartment to Carlton’s home base in Princes Park.

He was doing plenty of walking in 2015, given his wife had major surgery at a nearby hospital.

“I was back and forth up to the hospital just up the road,” he said.

But passers-by who saw Malthouse walking on the morning of May 26, 2015 — with his mobile pressed to his ear — could hardly have envisaged what would occur only hours later.

As he walked through Fitzroy Gardens, he conducted a provocative radio interview, challenging the Carlton board to back him or sack him.

Fuelling the fiery atmosphere, he suggested Trigg told him that Eddie Betts’ departure from Carlton to Adelaide — which Malthouse had been blamed for — had been predetermined months in advance. A subsequent AFL investigation cleared the Crows of any wrongdoing.

By the time Malthouse was inside the club’s facility, a media posse had gathered, with the scent of a sacking in the wind.

A few hours after the radio interview, the coach was sitting in a match committee meeting when he got word that Trigg wanted to see him.

“We were picking a side (to take on Sydney),” he said. “Someone may have come to the door … and got (football manager) Andy McKay. He said ‘I think they need to see you …”

“I knew straight away (I was about to be sacked).

“But why argue against it? When people have made up their mind, there is no point in me going in there and being silly about it. They are president and CEO. They are both bigger ranked than I am.”

The meeting that sacked Malthouse in Trigg’s office lasted less than 15 minutes. “We would have run out of words pretty quickly,” he said.

“At the end of the day, it didn’t finish the way I wanted it to.

“(They) have a capacity to terminate my contract, which I may not necessarily agree with, because I think contracts should run out, but nonetheless that’s where it is.”

CRIPPS AND CO.

Malthouse takes no solace out of Carlton’s struggles since his departure, but does take some pride in the performances of Patrick Cripps.

For he played a part — “to a degree” — in Cripps’ drafting, as pick 13 in the 2013 national draft, two months after being appointed coach.

One of the leading contenders for the Brownlow Medal this season, Cripps will play his 100th game for the Blues this weekend.

“You can’t get much better than Patty Cripps,” Malthouse said.

The recruitment of Chris Grant and Scott Wynd to the Bulldogs still gives him satisfaction, as he and Footscray recruiting manager Garry Merrington were playing “Moneyball” long before Michael Lewis’s book about Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s was published in 2003.

Malthouse and Merrington sourced a skinny kid from Daylesford at pick 105 in the 1988 national draft. His name was Chris Grant.

“Gary said (ahead of the 1988 draft), ‘Who do you like?’. I said, ‘That skinny kid, have a look at his date of birth’,” Malthouse said. “He hadn’t even turned 17.”

“When we went up and saw him, and saw his parents, they said, ‘He won’t be coming down, he is going to school next year’. I said, “No drama, he’s only skinny.”

Grant never played a senior game under Malthouse but went on to become one of the Bulldogs’ greatest players.

Wynd initially played with North Melbourne under-19s, but was eager to play senior football. A quirk of the system meant if a player hadn’t been registered by a certain time, he could be selected by a rival team.

His birthdate was “mixed up” and the Kangaroos’ hold on him elapses, allowing the Dogs to strategically pounce.

“North went nuts,” Malthouse recalled.

Wynd trained one night with Footscray, but didn’t turn up for the next session. Instead, the young ruckman tried his luck at Richmond training.

“Luckily, KB (Kevin Bartlett) had every man on the planet training at Punt Rd, and this kid (Wynd) comes over and (Bartlett) goes, ‘How old are you, son?’.”

After Wynd told him, the Tigers coach said, ‘The under-19s are over there’. He said, ‘I’m not playing under-19s’ and returned to the Western Oval, where he would become one of the best ruckmen of his generation.

THE FIFTH QUARTER

Malthouse had many great rivals, but the longest-standing — and most amusing — was his standoff with the media.

It was compelling viewing in post-game press conference.

After his sacking at Carlton, Malthouse wished the media well in his farewell statement, saying: “Despite our constant battlefield … you might even miss me!”

Asked about his relationship with the fourth estate on the Sacked podcast, Malthouse summed it up by using a Latin phase — si pacem para bellum.

The translation says it all — “If you seek peace, prepare for war’”.

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