Merrick had just guided Melbourne Victory to their first championship, capped by one of the most one-sided grand finals in the history of Australian sport: a 6-0 hammering of Adelaide United.

Arnold had come off an unforgettable year as Guus Hiddink's assistant coach with the national team, drinking from the fountain of knowledge that is the Dutch master. When Hiddink abdicated, his blessing was explicit: Arnold must be the successor.

He would take the Socceroos to the 2007 Asian Cup, a tournament the Socceroos were expected to win. The folly of those ambitions began unravelling the moment Badar Al-Maimani put Oman ahead in the opening group game.

As that campaign descended into chaos – with squad members treating it "like a five-star holiday", according to one player – Arnold's tenure began to fall apart.

He guided the Olyroos to the Olympics in 2008, but when he axed Nathan Burns and Bruce Djite without explanation, the vultures began circling. The Olyroos bombed in Beijing and it was open season on a one-time favourite son.

Meanwhile, Merrick was beginning to endure troubles of his own. Riding a rollercoaster that seemed to alternate failure with success, Victory fans, who always held deep misgivings about the Scotsman, began getting on his back.

Success was seen as a result of the players, never him. Merrick was tagged unadventurous and boring, symbolic of a club that did not understand its vocal fan base, who demanded fast, aggressive, flamboyant football.  Just a couple of years apart, the two coaches had gone from occupying two of the most important positions in the game to the scrapheap. Both were obsolete, borderline relics and out of touch. Too grumpy, too set in their ways.

It is almost May 2015, some eight years on, and both men are back at the top of the tree. They've taken vastly different journeys, but have returned when few saw it possible.

They will face off in the dugout in Wellington on Sunday and probably share a joke about their journey before the game. They are wily campaigners the machine couldn't kill.

But it would be wrong to think Arnold and Merrick were hard done by. Caught in the crossfire of changing times, they were stuck on the wrong wave and lost at sea: unwitting poster boys for all that Australian football had to leave behind.

Both men had to have a good look at themselves in the mirror. To be big enough to admit they made mistakes. While they both remained mystified at their treatment from that time – understandably – they stored that negative energy and used it to fuel their next mission.

For Merrick, that meant going back to his roots, returning to Scotland, completing his professional  licence and working out how to reinvent himself, not only as a coach, but a leader, a mentor, recruiter and a tactician in the digital age.

For Arnold, it meant bunkering down and finding the strength to admit he had glaring weaknesses. He needed to recognise he was a shadow of what he aspired to be. Eventually, he filled in the blanks.

For both, it was a brutal period of self-reconciliation and confrontation. But that period away from the game didn't just define them as coaches. It defined them as men.

They came back smarter and calmer. More assured. Less prone to losing their cool. Better at keeping things in perspective.

Outside of wins and losses, the best measure of a coach is whether players improve under his tutelage. There are countless "good news" stories at Moore Park and the Cake Tin. While they might miss the Premier's Plate this season, expect both men to have a huge say in who takes the title.