WITH NO AFL coaches facing the sack or likely to resign at the end of 2008, and Michael Voss firmly ensconced at West Coast until the end of 2010, two of the more intriguing question marks hang over Nathan Buckley and Mark Williams.

Rarely has a coach-in-waiting loomed more enticingly than the recently retired Collingwood champion Buckley, who strives for perfection in pretty much all his professional pursuits.

Buckley has already started his coaching homework and insists he would not take on the job without completing an apprenticeship as an assistant.

Given the joint assumptions that he plans to honour his media contracts until the end of 2009 and that Mick Malthouse is safely contracted at Collingwood until then, the timing looks tricky for the Magpies as they continue to regard their nine-year skipper as a future coach.

But of course Malthouse could go on for years and relationships change. As Williams told The Age on Friday, so much of the AFL's destiny relies on timing.

Had his contract not been reportedly watertight, the Port Adelaide coach could be coaching Essendon now and not facing the most dramatic one-season ladder fall for a grand finalist in the competition's history.

Interestingly, should Buckley choose an assistant coaching position, he has indicated in the past that two of his first choices would be to work under Williams, another former Collingwood captain, or Sydney coach Paul Roos.

Williams, a former teacher, has been criticised this season for taking his eye off the ball, but he has never stopped in his relentless quest for knowledge — and the recipient of any wisdom he collects has always been his football club.

So much has gone wrong at Alberton this season. Williams' best players have been down on form or injured and the Power has lost games by narrow margins that last year it won.

Whether Williams will be targeted as the main man at fault remains unclear, but either way, the coach, who already has two former assistants in senior positions elsewhere, appears determined to keep coaching in the AFL.

Like Malthouse, Williams is contracted until the end of next year and does not expect to be offered a new deal until the middle of next season. Port's dismal season aside, these are testing times for a club that continues to struggle to attract strong attendances and which has undergone a dramatic change in personnel.

Not only is the club's only president Greg Boulton about to hand over the job to his deputy, but the club's chief executive and chief financial officer have quit for lucrative positions overseas.

Williams also lost his head fitness coach to the Socceroos and his long-time ally and popular club communications chief Hitaf Rasheed to a state government position.

The situation at Port Adelaide seems comparable to the end of 2004 when the club won a premiership and promptly lost a swag of assistant coaches.

Williams has lost another key ally in Adelaide's Advertiser's chief football writer Michaelangelo Rucci. A passionate Port Adelaide supporter whose unusually close relationship with the coach in the past has made their falling out all the more dramatic, Rucci has portrayed Williams this season as an ego out of control. He recently stated that if Power was a Victorian club, it would be facing interstate relocation.

Of course, Port Adelaide is not Victorian and despite its relatively small support base boasts a unique heritage, colourful history and passion.

The coach and the club have been inexorably tied and have seemed a perfect match, but perhaps they have tired of each other and the time has come for Williams to bring his unique style to another AFL club.

My educated guess is that by the end of next year there will be a couple of options for Williams in Melbourne.

There is absolutely not a shred of evidence that any of the 2008 exodus departed because of Williams, but he has continued to be portrayed in his city's only major newspaper as a control freak (true) who refuses to take advice and freezes out those who question him (not so true).

It has also been reported that he has fallen out with such assistants as his once inseparable friend and Collingwood and Brisbane teammate Phil Walsh, now a forward scout for the club who Williams fought to keep at Port Adelaide.

Williams admits the pair are not as close as they once were, but Walsh and he still surf together and the latter attended the senior coach's 50th birthday bash at an Adelaide club last night.

There was a band, plenty of dancing and a skit put together by Williams' children who unearthed an old school report that described the premiership coach as "a little noisy" and intolerant of those less driven than him.

As usual, the coach did not indulge in alcohol and joked several days ago that if last year's grand final did not drive him to drink then nothing would.

He described his 50th birthday as also a time of reflection for him and his family given that it should also have been celebrated by his twin brother Anthony, killed in a freak accident aged 29.

Which would seem to place Port Adelaide's trials this season, along with the tribulations of its coach, in some perspective.