I ask if he remembers falling in love with the game. He doesn't. What he remembers is always having a footy with him, always kicking it. Then, in grade 2 at primary school, he learnt that the father of his classmate Damian Gargan had played three games with North Melbourne. "I thought,  'Holy shit!' It was like having Neil Armstrong's son in your class."

His first team, the Warragul Colts, was coached by Frank Aherne. At my request, he supplies a word picture of Frank – five feet tall, smartly dressed, hair slicked back. "His catchcry was 'Kick it to the open spaces and be prepared to run.' " He recalls the line with one of his trademark grins. Was Frank a good coach, I ask. "Yes," he says, serious again. "He was still coaching until a couple of years ago."

Bob Murphy's a footballer, but he's a lot of other things besides. His Fairfax Media columns (a collection of which, titled Murphy's Lore, will be available in a few weeks) are commonly described as quirky. While only opening the door on what he could achieve as a writer, they reveal an original sensibility, one that dances nimbly between taking sport seriously and viewing it humorously.

He also plays guitars and sings with passion. In company, he's genial, amused and amusing, except when telling stories about footy and he decides he needs your arm as a prop or demonstrates bodying an opponent using you as the opponent. He tells great footy stories, not because they're salacious, but because he has rare insight.

He was 12 when the next meaningful moment in his football life occurred – Trent Hotton got picked up by Collingwood. Hotton was from Warragul. "His mum taught with my mum at the high school." Before Trent Hotton, the AFL seemed "too far away, too magical" for a kid from Warragul to imagine playing. Trent Hotton made it tangible.

Murphy got to the Bulldogs in 2000 at the age of 17, weighing 68 kilograms. The coach, Terry Wallace, said he could ride the top weight at Flemington. But he felt at home. When I ask him the person he most associates with his football club, he says John Schultz. The blond-haired Bulldogs ruckman, an intelligent and athletic footballer, won the 1960 Brownlow Medal and five club best and fairests.

"When we first got there, he spoke to us. He was always there, in the rooms, right from the start. He'd be there with Charlie [1954 premiership coach Charlie Sutton]. He was always – he searches for the right word – present."

When I ask him the most memorable of his 271 games, he says with a grin, "It'd be hard to go past the first one." That came late in 2000. Carlton had won "13 or 14 in a row". Anthony "Kouta" Koutoufides was at his imperial best. The Dogs were without stars Chris Grant and Luke Darcy and had so many injuries the skinny kid from Warragul got his chance.  "I was shit-scared I'd mess up my kick during the warm-up."

The Dogs warmed up in front of the Carlton cheer squad. "It was like the Colosseum." He played on Matthew "Skinny" Lappin.  He grins and says, "He beat the shit out of me all day". Dogs full-back Matthew Croft went out of his way to give Murphy an early kick to settle him.

There are Dogs fans who insist Murphy kicked the winning goal in his first match. He didn't, but he did kick the goal that put them ahead for the first time in the game with minutes to go. He took a Scott West handpass and kicked "the rankest, ugliest drop punt – but it went straight".  Carlton answered with a goal of their own and a "dodgy free to Trent Bartlett" got the Dogs over the line.

Bulldog veteran Simon Garlick kicked six that day. In the ecstasy of victory, he grabbed the 18-year-old and said, "Where have you been all year?"

"There's feeling part of it," says Murphy, "and then there's really feeling part of it." After that, he really felt part of the Dogs.

He played in Rocket Eade's Bulldogs teams that made three preliminary finals in a row. He calls that "the big disappointment". "In 2008, we came from nowhere – it was a wild adventure." Their best chance was 2009, losing to the Saints by seven points. He still thinks about that match "most weeks".

But by 2009 his body was "falling apart – just getting out there each week felt like going to war ". An operation failed to repair a patella tendon injury and he had constant pain. "We knew as a team we were at the time to really go for it, but I didn't feel I could give my best."

His wife Justine put him in the path of an osteopath named Diego Ortuso, a gentle man with healing ways. "The medicos at the club have been terrific but, if it wasn't for Diego, I probably wouldn't be still playing." His knee now gives him less trouble than it did six years ago.

He looks back on the Rocket Eade years with fondness. "Rocket brought a sense of adventure and made us feel that, as a team, we had something that was different to everyone else." He recently watched videos of games from the Rocket era. "They were wild. We were running round like brumbies."

Rocket is not a coach who plays his hand before he's studied his cards. "When he got to the Dogs, he found he had a lot of players who could run and kick. He devised a game about going fast, kicking the ball, kicking it at angles. We didn't go all the way, but we felt we were different from the rest of the competition  and could give anyone headaches."

Eade was succeeded as coach by Brendan McCartney, a tenure that ended with club captain Ryan Griffen and Brownlow medallist Adam Cooney walking out on the Bulldogs and McCartney resigning. "Brendan wanted us to play a more combative, more conservative game. I think I improved under him as a player, but for some players it might have been too big a jump from the free-wheeling kind of team we'd been under Rocket."

Bob Murphy is a natural captain. He naturally thinks in group terms. He can speak publicly; he can deliver personal truths privately. He's loyal. He should've been captain last year, if not before, and you have to ask why he wasn't and whether it had anything to do with an incident that occurred in his first year.

Murphy's first season in the AFL coincided with the first invasion of Iraq. There was a furore when the Bulldogs team photo for that year was found to have a freckle-faced kid in the back row with NO WAR written on his bare arm. For some in the conservative world of AFL football, the question thereafter was – how "far out" is Robert Murphy? I'd say he is as far outside the game as he is inside it – which is a long way!

A highly skilful player, he has matured like wine, was All-Australian in 2011 and fourth in the Dogs' best and fairest last year.  He's 32 and married to Justine Quigley, who captured his rapt attention when he was in year 7 and she was in year 8 at Marist Scion College in Warragul. They have three children.

Did he want the captaincy? "Yeah. I hadn't burned for it, but I was ready for it when it came to me.  It seemed like we were being kicked from everywhere. I thought I could help steady the boat." Right now, a lot of people at the Bulldogs are new – new coach, lots of new players. He grins and says, "We're still falling in love."  I ask him about new coach Luke Beveridge. He can't find the word he's looking for, not yet anyway, but my impression is that what Bob Murphy likes about Luke Beveridge is his balance of passion and self-control. "He's got the fire," he says, "but he's got that other thing."

When I spoke to him two weeks ago, he told me that what the Dogs needed at that moment was "a bit of story-telling". That evening, he got the Footscray Football Club evangelist  from the 1990s, Terry Wheeler, to explain to the troops why playing for the Bulldogs matters. In 1992, in partnership with Peter Gordon, Wheeler took a club that two years earlier had been demoralised and on the edge of extinction to an AFL preliminary final. Wheeler always believed the Bulldogs had to understand what it meant to play for the western suburbs of Melbourne. So does Murphy.

I rate Bob Murphy with the likes of Brent Crosswell, Nathan Buckley and Michael Long as being among the most interesting characters I've met through footy. The young men in Captain Bob's team will have a year to remember. "We're going on an adventure," he says.