Trent Croad’s foot was already broken but, with each painful step he took, it felt as if the bone was splintering into a thousand tiny pieces over and over again.

But despite the searing pain and the adrenaline coursing through his veins, the Hawthorn defender instinctively knew he had to summon one last act of defiance.

He figured it was likely to be his final AFL act.

It was the second term of the 2008 Grand Final, with red-hot favourites Geelong leading Hawthorn by two points. As Croad hobbled his way towards the bench, he could see Joel Selwood ready to win the ball.

His mind gave his failing foot an order it simply couldn’t refuse.

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“(The foot) was getting sorer (during the game) … I went to take off, push off my foot and then it just went bang,” Croad told the Herald Sun’s Sacked podcast.

“I looked down and it (his left foot) was at right angles, the whole front of my foot.

“I put my hand onto the foot. I was trying to push it back and I almost pushed it in half.”

Enter Selwood, and an opportunity for Croad, in his 222nd and final AFL game, to, quite literally, go out of elite football with a bang.

“I saw Selwood 20 metres away … I kind of looked around … (I thought). F — it, gotta go, gotta go,“ he said.

“Then with every step that I took, it was just like getting dry sticks and breaking them in half. I could hear it. I could hear everything. I knew it was gonna be my last effort.” 

Croad hobbled towards Selwood. Somehow he laid a bump on the Geelong young gun in a move that inspired his teammates, who were on the way towards achieving a massive Grand Final boilover.

Even today, almost 14 years on, it still raises the hackles on the back of Croad’s neck.

It would prove his final - and proudest - moment in AFL football.

“Absolutely (it was a proud moment),” he said.

“I am really proud of that. I got him (Selwood) … got him well.”

The man Alastair Clarkson called ‘Brutus’ had to follow the fortunes of the game from down in the bowels of the MCG change rooms, watching on a small television as he went through six pethidine sticks to dull the agony.

The doctors urged him to go to hospital in an ambulance. He refused. He had waited for this moment for most of his life and wasn’t going to miss it.

It was only late in the last quarter, when the young Hawks appeared almost certain to dethrone Geelong, that he figured he had to leave the rooms.

“I was watching the game from the rooms, there was a little one (television) in the corner,” he said. “I thought to myself, ‘S —, we are going to win this’. I said: ‘Give me the crutches’.”

Croad described the final siren heralding the Hawks’ 26-point win as “spine tingling stuff”, as he celebrated among victorious teammates, including his great mate and Norm Smith Medallist Luke Hodge, for whom he had been traded to Fremantle seven years earlier.

“(The Grand Final) was a wonderful, wonderful, significant day, not only for the win but for the journey to (that moment),“ he said.

KIWI HAWK

If it hadn’t been for a family decision to leave New Zealand when Croad was around five, he might well have been an All-Black.

His grandfather Eric Boggs was a rugby great, with Croad saying: “He was one of the biggest names in New Zealand … that’s where our pedigree came through.”

“When we first came (to Australia) I started at Doncaster Heights Junior Footy Club … I remember going to my first clinic and picking up the ball and just taking off,” he said.

“I was trying to fend off (in rugby style) and they were like ‘No, you have got to bounce it and handball it’. We had to learn all about the game.”

Growing up a Hawthorn fan, with a Jason Dunstall poster adorning his bedroom wall, he came along at a time when footy recruiters were looking for athletes who could run and run.

Croad was almost the teenage prototype.

Croad was selected by Hawthorn at pick three in the 1997 national draft, behind Melbourne’s Travis Johnstone and Richmond’s Brad Ottens. He watched the draft from the back of the library at De La Salle’s Kinnoull campus, having just finished his Year 12 English exam.

“The exam finished at 12.15 and the draft started at 12, so I (made sure) I finished my exams at 11.59. I raced into the back (of the library) and all the boys raced in.”

Richmond visited Croad and his mum “pretty much the night before the draft” but he was thankful it was “a decoy”.

He got to go to the club he had always barracked for.

“I just did what I was told,” he said of his Glenferrie Oval start. “I was lucky to be broken in by these big strong people. I guess I had the body to go with them. But we learnt the hard way.

“I went down to Hawthorn and they said ‘We’re going to slowly ease you in over a few years’. But they put me straight in to play Collingwood in Round 1.”

DERM AND DUNSTALL

His first pre-season camp saw him room with his hero Jason Dunstall, even if it made for a slightly uncomfortable setting.

“I can’t go into it too much, besides him sleeping in the nude every night,” he said. “Here I was at 17 sleeping in my pyjamas and socks and fully covered up.

“Jason was a great influence on us. I was lucky enough to play in his last game in his last year and Johnny Hay and I carried him off, which was a bit of a changing of the guard.

“We could only walk about 10 metres with him.”

Croad also struck up a great friendship with former club great Dermott Brereton, albeit he did get the young Hawk into trouble early on.

Croad was suspended for headbutting Port Adelaide’s Matthew Primus early in his career, which Brereton later claimed he caused by giving him a rev-up in the lead-up to the match.

Croad recalled: “They (the opposition) were starting to get into me a bit … Johnny (Hay) and I copped it all the time, but it did season us really quickly.

Did the Brereton rev-up have anything to do with his first suspension? “Absolutely”, Croad said with a laugh.

“I love Derm. He would come down to training on Tuesday and Thursday nights and we would do one-on-one marking. Then he would grab you and throw you to the ground.

“He was a huge influence for me.”

PICK A VIC

Croad’s spectacular start to his AFL career saw him selected for Victoria in only his second season - and he would go on to represent Australia at the end of that 1999 season.

Not everyone was happy, though. The Hawks tried to stop it, believing he was too young to deal with the exposure that followed.

“Absolutely, straight up, they tried to stop it,” he said of the Hawks.
They definitely tried to stop it.”

“A couple of times Johnny (Hay) got selected for WA and I got selected for Victoria. They were really wary of it because they were worried about injuries. They didn’t want kids playing extra games.”

But Croad derived so much experience out of representative football.

“I absolutely loved it, especially the Australian teams travelling to Ireland,” he said.

He got to play on some of the biggest names in football and held his own on most occasions.

“The biggest ones I set myself for were (Nick) Riewoldt and Jonathan Brown. In my All Australian year (2005), they were ones that I had to win.”

THAT INTERVIEW

As Croad’s form helped the Hawks to a strong 2001 - in his fourth season - he did an interview with the Herald Sun where he spoke about his passion for real estate and how he was an athlete playing AFL footy.

He would be praised for such a story in 2022, with clubs happy for players to express themselves and have interests outside of football.

But it was a different story two decades ago and he came in for criticism both within and outside the Hawthorn Football Club.

Part of the focus was a photo of Croad with a briefcase in his hand in front of a red BMW. He wishes he hadn’t taken part in the photo shoot.

“I remember Ben Dixon pulled me up in a meeting after one of the games against Melbourne and said ‘Mate, what the hell?’” he said.

“There are a few things I would have changed about it (in hindsight).

“Everything happened pretty quickly for me. I just liked those things at the time (real estate and business).”

Croad was criticised on The Footy Show by then Richmond player Brendon Gale, who is now Tigers’ CEO.

Gale said at the time: “What I found disturbing (about the story) was that there were all these mentions of the trappings that go with football and it probably suggested that his core focus was not on football.”

Compounding the attention was the fact Croad had few quiet weeks after the article appeared which saw the Hawks include him in a VFL game when the senior team had a bye.

“It had no relation to (the article),” he said. “They dropped me? That was absolute crap. They stopped me (from having a few beers during the bye). Were they going to allow Crawf and I to go up to the Gold Coast for the weekend?

“They played me (at Box Hill) for a half and then s — themselves that I was going to get injured, I kicked a couple of goals and they said ‘Get him off’. I don’t even think I even stayed until the end of the game. I went straight home from there.”

THAT POSTER

Peter Schwab’s Hawks went on a wild ride through the 2001 finals series and took the preliminary final right up to the reigning premiers Essendon.

Twenty minutes into a frantic final term, Croad came steaming through centre of the ground and sent a long bomb towards goal that for a time seemed certain to go through and put the Hawks in front. But it faded and clipped the post.

The man himself thought it was home. He said with his tongue in cheek: “I was rucking (at the time) and I had a shot from 100 metres out, it gets longer every year.”

“It started as if it was on, but then there was a late fade at the end. Something took it (the wind) or maybe it was just the way I kicked it.”

The poster proved the end of the Hawks resistance. Instead of being two points in front, the Hawks were unable to stop the Bombers, who kicked the next two goals from Paul Barnard and Scott Lucas. They went on to book a Grand Final berth with a nine-point win.

It was Croad’s 84th game for Hawthorn.

Within weeks he would find out that his club was putting him on the trade table in order to secure the No.1 draft pick who would end up being Colac teenager Luke Hodge.

Croad was “shattered”. To make matters worse, the Hawks wouldn’t deal with Essendon - and Kevin Sheedy - about their bid for the key position player.

He was headed to Fremantle as a result, despite passionate pleas from Hawks fans.

WAY OUT WEST AND COMING HOME

Croad agreed to move to Perth to play for the Dockers, but always knew one day he would return to Hawthorn.

He learnt two early lessons in Western Australia - the Eagles always trump the Dockers in terms of favourable media treatment and “don’t be a Melbourne boy playing in Perth for too long.”.

Croad would go onto play 38 games across two seasons with Fremantle, but some of the negative media attention he got made it a difficult period.

He also wished the Dockers had played him in his usual defensive role, not in attack.

“In my first year I was leading goalkicker on 42 (goals), but it was never enough over there,” he said. “I had a good first year, but once you start to switch off, I honestly had enough.”

“I made some wonderful friends over there, I spent time with (basketball great) Luc Longley. He was great (as a mentor).”

He was even dropped back to the WAFL for one game in his second season.

His heart was elsewhere.

At the end of 2003, Hawthorn made a call to his manager Paul Connors about the possibility of a Croad return.

He jumped at the chance.

“Paul rang me straight away and I couldn’t pack up my bags and my house quickly enough.”

He had no hard feelings about the Dockers’ years, he just wanted to go home to Hawthorn.

“I was at the right age, about 24, and I was getting my s— together,” he said.

“They were great young kids (in the team) and you could feel we were going places.”

Croad relished the return and his football flourished.

In his second season back, and in Alastair Clarkson’s first season as coach, he made the 2005 All-Australian team and loved working with the young Hawks as they started a rebuild that would ultimately end in premiership glory in 2008.

He tried to play on the following year, but his foot was too far gone.

These days, Croad is a father of three (daughters Keira and Sierra and son Phoenix) and has reconnected even more so with Hawthorn, having been invited back on a few occasions this year.

“I’ve only started going back to the footy again and I’m really loving it,” he said.

He and his partner Kate Jesaulenko have worked on a new event, A Walk in the Park, to raise awareness and funds for Fight Parkinson’s as Kate’s legendary father, Blues legend Alex, fights the disease.

Croad’s extraordinary AFL journey may have ended on that famous day back in 2008, but his love of the Hawks endures to this day.