Essendon's Saturday night clash with Richmond, the now traditional "Dreamtime at the G" game, is the centrepiece of the AFL's Indigenous Round, now named after Sir Douglas Nicholls.

Worsfold hails from a football home boasting some of the finest Indigenous players Australian football has seen - names like Farmer, Cable, Matera, Jackson and Michael. Now he's coaching a club at which the ties with Indigenous culture are strong indeed, and names like McDonald, Long and Wanganeen are part of the cultural fabric.

The significance isn't lost on him and on Tuesday he implored his players to do the occasion justice. But there will be plenty who know the Essendon coach well who'll be just as keen for them to do Worsfold justice, too.

However much he attempts to play it down, Worsfold reaches an important milestone on Saturday night, only the 18th man in VFL/AFL history to reach the 500-game mark as both a player and coach.

Only two of his coaching contemporaries, Paul Roos (611 games) and Rodney Eade (604), have got there before him. And neither of them have been part of premierships as both a player and coach as Worsfold has.

Asked about the achievement on Tuesday, Worsfold was typically understated. "It means I've been around for a while, I suppose," he joked.

"I love the game, I've loved my involvement through the whole time and I haven't been involved with a view to achieve any milestones, I've just been lucky to have been involved this long and I'm still really loving it."

You'd need to be to work with the sort of hand Worsfold has been dealt over the more recent chapters of his football story. The two premierships as captain of West Coast then one as coach of the Eagles in 2006 were, comparatively, the easy part. What's come since hasn't been for the faint-hearted.

First there was the implosion of Ben Cousins, the departure of skipper Chris Judd and the virtual disintegration of a team that might have had a lot more success left in it but for the disturbing sub-culture of drug use, which brought a whole club to its knees and forced Worsfold to reappraise the extent of his own responsibilities.

He nonetheless was able to pick up the pieces so effectively that the very season after landing an inglorious wooden spoon, West Coast was back inside the top four.

Burned out by the end of 2013, his return to the game's inner-sanctum came via the scarcely believable murder of Adelaide coach Phil Walsh midway through last year, Worsfold acting not only as a mentor for Walsh's temporary replacement Scott Camporeale, but as a calming influence on a playing and coaching group rocked by tragedy.

Adelaide's effort in somehow still playing finals football last year will rank as an amazing achievement, and Worsfold's part in keeping the place as stable as was possible shouldn't be underestimated.

Now he presides over another club picking up the pieces of a disaster, this one self-inflicted. And once more the goalposts were savagely shifted when just two months before the start of the season, and having gone through the bulk of the pre-season, Worsfold lost a dozen of his most senior and most capable players suspended for the year, a summer of careful planning rendered as good as useless.

Essendon is struggling on field without their stars. But their unflappable coach continues to keep spirits up and the humour good despite a 1-8 win-loss record, the focus relentlessly on development and education.

Worsfold's emotional state never seems to vary regardless of the circumstances, a key to his survival first as a ruthless but still measured on-field leader, then the man in the coaching driver's seat.

No moment underlined that better than his press conference less than an hour after his West Coast side had lost the 2005 grand final to Sydney by just four points, the stuff of coaching heartbreak. Asked how he would recover, Worsfold didn't bat an eyelid. "I'll be over it by tomorrow, ready to prepare and go forward," he said.

Little has changed in the decade since. And it's why whatever left-field challenges the game continues to throw at him, Worsfold has every chance of adding a few more hundreds to his career tally. Not that you'll get much out of him about it.