After several hours over two meetings with Boyd, I came away with a more rounded view of the midfielder, one of the most honest and forthright players I’ve met.

Despite winning a best and fairest, finishing equal sixth in the Brownlow Medal last year, earning All-Australian honours and being named the Bulldogs’ 29th captain, he is not a player we know that much about.

The common perception of Boyd, born out of the way we see him play football, is close to the mark. He is straight-talking and hard-working. Intolerant of fools. And he is tough - his face is hardened and his hands strong.

But, as he reveals, there certainly is another side to him, one the football public would rarely have seen. Boyd is also a finance-studying, risotto-cooking, tattoo-bearing, Will Ferrell-devoted, routine-obsessed, blue-eyed devoted husband whose face lights up with almost giddy excitement when talking about the impending birth of his first child, due later this month.

Boyd sheepishly peeps his head through the door of a back room of Figjam Café in Carnegie, a trendy suburb in Melbourne’s south-east. It’s his only day off for the week and we were scheduled - as per text message from the club’s media manager the night before - to meet at 10am. It’s 10.01 when Boyd, with freshly shaved head, an ounce of fashionable stubble and slightly crooked nose, greets me with a firm handshake. “Sorry I’m late,” he says, with a deep, husky voice. “I thought you were out the front.”

Dressed in dark jeans, thongs and a designer T-shirt, Boyd slides in to the busy café (potentially named after a well-known colloquial term not appropriate for Boyd) without one patron turning his or her head. He does down-to-earth better than most. While I have jumped up to buy hot chocolates Boyd has grabbed a bottle of water and filled both cups.

“Are you sure you don’t want to go outside to do it? Will that pick it up?” he asks, pointing at my iPhone, doubling as a recorder. The simple gestures serve as a reminder of one thing: Boyd remains unaffected by his success. Such an approach, without ego or self-importance, can likely be traced to his background.

Sharon and Peter Boyd divorced when Matthew was young, and he lived at home with his mother (now a coterie group member of the Bulldogs who never misses one of her son’s games) until he was almost 21. He’s inherited her discipline, persistence and ambition.

“That’s just how I am; it’s how Mum brought me up,” he says.

Read the full story in this weekend’s edition of the AFL Record, available at all games.