IT'S lunchtime, and starting to get very noisy and crowded in the cafe next to Hawthorn's headquarters at the old Waverley Park.

Luke Hodge is in the middle of explaining how he's learned to cope with tagging when midfield cohort and Hawk skipper Sam Mitchell appears and drops $150 on the table.

"Sorry, I keep forgetting," Mitchell says.

What's the money for?

"He's got to pay to be friends with me," Hodge chuckles.

And you could almost believe it. The Hawthorn star and vice-captain would be a pretty handy mate to have, on or off the field.

On the ground, he's the consummate team man. Beautifully skilled, a superb, penetrating kick with a disposal efficiency rating of more than 83% in the AFL's most efficient kicking team. He's consistent: first, second and third in Hawthorn's best and fairest the past three seasons.

Courageous, most memorably in last year's elimination final win over Adelaide, when he returned from what appeared a serious knee injury to help drag his team over the line. And always an aggressive flyer of the brown-and-gold flag when there's a whiff of antagonism in the air.

They're qualities that draw people to Hodge. While a genuine superstar these days, he's still very much the affable, easy-going country kid who arrived at the club nearly seven years ago.

Everybody loves "Hodgey". The coaches. The fans. The people from his old stamping ground of Colac. His opponents, many of whom he seems to share some sort of connection with. Even when they're trying to fix him up.

Like last Sunday at the MCG, when another old Colac boy, Amon Buchanan, ran right through Hodge, hard and high enough to earn the Sydney little man a four-game suspension.

Hodge managed to pick himself up and shake out the cobwebs before walking to the rooms at half-time with "a bit of a headache". Yet even then he could have a laugh about it.

"We walked in and (teammate) Brent Guerra said, 'You know who that was?' I said no, then he told me it was 'Monty'. I guess I left myself open, and he took advantage of it," Hodge smiles.

"I told him after the game he's turned his body into a little nugget. I didn't think he could hit that hard!

"His parents and my mum lived in the same street, and he was only two years older than me, so I played school footy with him."

There's currently a far more important link between the pair, too. Buchanan's partner Cara had a baby girl, Elke, on Thursday.

And Hodge's partner Lauren is due to give birth next Thursday, two days before the much-hyped potential grand final preview between Hawthorn and Geelong.

That's no dilemma, by the way. Hodge, who is 24, is quite firm that if the birth happens around game time, he'll be by Lauren's side and not at the MCG. But exciting as is the imminent arrival for Hodge, for the first time since his initial steps in AFL football there's a fair bit of anxiety, too.

"I've been thinking I'm ready for it, but the closer it gets, I'm starting to think, 'Shit, I'm not too sure'. There's a few things I don't know if I'll be able to handle that well."

Like what?

"Trying to stop the baby crying, I guess. I go around to my cousin's, and hold their baby till it starts crying, then you just pass it back to mum or dad. I've got no one to pass it back to now!"

Hodge is 12 years older than his brother, Dylan, whom he looked after on occasion when his sibling was an infant. That was doing his parents a favour. This is the real thing. And Hodge knows that in the gradual maturing process that has gone on since he was drafted as a 17-year-old at the end of 2001, this is by far the biggest step.

Hawthorn has one of the youngest lists in the AFL; not many players have kids. But Hodge has noticed a distinct change in the few teammates who do have had kids.

"Mark Williams, he's just a different bloke now, more mature. 'Croady' (Trent Croad) bought Kiera to the club the other day. And 'Crawf' (Shane Crawford), well, I don't think Crawf will ever grow up, but I've seen him with little Charlie, and he's great with him."

Hodge says he and the club are clear on his priority if there's a clash next Friday night.

"They know that if the baby's born around game time, I'll miss, but if I can still get to the game before the first bounce, I'll play. Especially, being Geelong, something you build yourself up for just because of how good they've been the last 18 months.

"They sat down at the end of 2006 and were pretty honest with each other, and it just goes to show if you put enough pressure on your teammates and try to get the best out of them what you can do."

And no, before the inevitable finger is pointed, Hodge isn't getting ahead of himself. In the next breath, he mentions how tough tonight's assignment against St Kilda will be. In particular, the midfield stoush with the Saints' Luke Ball, whom Hodge sat next to on Thursday night's Footy Show panel.

Ball provides yet another connection or two. As junior sporting prodigies, the pair played cricket and football with and against each other from the age of 12. As footballers, they were part of a famous Victorian schoolboys' under-12 line-up that also included the likes of Gary Ablett and Adam and Troy Selwood.

Of course, Ball played No. 2 to Hodge's No. 1 in the famous national draft of 2001, which also delivered a bloke by the name of Chris Judd at No. 3. The ratings of their respective progress are still being made, even seven years down the track and each with 100 games under their belts. In fact, it seems that Hodge's whole football life has been one of comparison, most recently with Mitchell, the bloke who dropped off the $150 and who, along with Hodge, was the obvious candidate for the captaincy when Richie Vandenberg retired last year.

It was, and remains, a "sexy" angle — Hodge the knockabout country kid versus Mitchell the studious city boy.

But what is often lost in the public pitting of personalities is how well they complement each other. And get on.

"We said no matter who was picked we were going to back each other, no matter what," Hodge says.

In a recent interview with The Age, Mitchell was happy to acknowledge Hodge as the team's "spiritual leader", whose best work is delivered on the ground. Hodge, similarly, has no problem at all conceding that Mitchell is the superior leader away from game day.

"He's probably the more mature one of us," he admits. "He's sensational on the field, but his main strength is probably off the field.

"Everything he does off the field is just spot on, absolutely 100%. I still need support from 'Mitch' off the field."

Not nearly as much these days, though. Hodge still brings up the valuable lesson learned from the one-game suspension imposed on him by the club in his best-and-fairest year of 2005 for missing a weights session after some over-exuberant celebrating of his 21st birthday.

"I had a heap of mates down, and I caught up with them again on the Sunday," he recalls. "I went to bed, then woke up to 'Vanders' at the end of my bed saying, 'Hey, mate, you should have come to training, you missed a weights session'.

"I just had too good a weekend and slept through the alarm. It wasn't that big a deal, but I just think at that stage, where we were coming from, we'd been down the bottom for three or four years, and probably our discipline as a group wasn't that good. When (coach Alastair Clarkson) explained to me that the crime didn't fit the punishment but he had to do it for the future of the club, I had no problems with that."

Finding the right balance between professionalism and appreciating the pleasure of a career as an AFL footballer is a juggling act. But it's one Hodge now has down pat.

"I can't think of anything else I'd want to do," he says. "I still get that much enjoyment out of playing, spending every day with all the blokes in here then going out there on the weekend and fighting as hard as you can to get over the line.

"We had some bad years, and it's just good to see the group mature together. If we keep it up and stick together, who knows where we can go?"

Most football watchers have a pretty good idea. And they also have a good idea of the size of the part that Hodge will play in that ascension. It's a role for which he was born.

Which brings us back to that imminent parenting role.

"I've said to 'Loz' I'll get up in the night early in the week, so later on in the week I can try to have a bit of extra sleep," Hodge says.

Is that OK with her? He laughs.

"She's just surprised I'm going to get up at all."

Maybe he could give Mitchell the $150 back. If the skipper has to fork out to be Hodge's mate, what's a bit of babysitting?

And everybody loves Hodgey.

ANALYSIS

JUST because you're one of the elite players in the AFL doesn't mean you can't continue to improve. And Luke Hodge is a hard taskmaster.

The left-footer has long been acknowledged as one of the best and most damaging handful of kicks in the competition. But he says he is not in any position to give the occasionally wayward Lance "Buddy" Franklin any advice.

"I get bagged here for my kicking," he says with a laugh, before acknowledging that his past few games "have been a bit better" for accuracy. He's selling himself short.

Hodge's disposal effectiveness is currently a career-high 83.5%. And it is his capacity to both create scoring opportunities and score goals himself that is proving so lethal.

For a fourth season in a row, Hodge, a clearance master, leads the Hawks for scores from stoppages. Hawthorn has this season had 25 shots at goal directly from a Hodge clearance win.

He is also one of the few midfielders going around with the capacity to inflict scoreboard damage himself. He has kicked 16 goals so far this season, and an amazingly accurate 13.0 in his past six games.

Hodge is averaging the equal most goals (1.5 a game) of any player to average 20 or more disposals. The other player with that high a figure, Adelaide's Simon Goodwin, has spent far more time near goal than Hodge, whose goalkicking feats have this season come far more from midfield.

Yet Hodge remains unsatisfied. "I spent a lot of time in the off-season trying to put a bit more air on the kick," he says. "I was probably trying to stab them too much, and might have been hitting the target six out of 10. The last six or eight games, I've tried to sit it up more and let the forwards run on to it, which I think has improved my accuracy.

"We do a lot of kicking stuff with (kicking coach) David Rath. A lot of our skills work over the pre-season focused on kicking under fatigue, because over the last three to four years that's where we've made the majority of our mistakes.

"You can always touch on something. Look at Brent Guerra, who we probably rate one of the best kicks in the league. He's still always out there doing extra kicking, and making sure he's maintaining where his skills are at."

And so, clearly, according to the stats, is Hodge. While most of his figures have hovered around the same lofty mark since his 2005 best-and-fairest win, significantly, the one that has continued to climb even higher is disposal efficiency.

It was good enough, at 77.1%, in that stellar 2005 season. The following year it rose again to 79.9, then to 81.5 last year, before this season's benchmark 83.5.

Combine that deadly accurate field kicking with an even greater appetite for goals, and you realise that when the Hawk midfielder has the ball in his hands he is almost certainly going to either hit a teammate lace-out, set up a scoring chance, or kick one himself.

And if Hodge can manage to find further improvement in what is already for him a fine art, opponents might soon be marking down a Hawthorn score before he has even transferred the ball from hand to foot.