TRENT Croad lay sprawled out across his hospital bed as his anaesthetist administered several dozen acupuncture needles to his left wrist and broken left foot, swollen to the size of a football and expected to sideline him for up to four months.

His lazy smile, induced by a combination of premiership and morphine, was punctuated by a blackened right eye courtesy of a first-quarter smash with Cameron Mooney. As accident victims in Calvin Kleins they don't come any happier than this one.

An old war wound, Croad's disfigured right ring finger meant he had to choose another one for the gold Hawk-embossed premiership ring the club has ordered for all of its 22 champions. Croad was being fitted for the ring yesterday when The Age visited him.

The 28-year-old's premiership medallion was at his bedside wrapped around the bottle of Grange Hermitage delivered from the cellar of club president and the neighbour he pinches firewood from — Jeff Kennett. At some point, said Croad, he is looking forward to drinking it, but not for some time.

He has been booked for surgery in one week, but has been told not to move his foot before then. So concerned was the club by the state of his injury, which was managed through the finals and finally gave way 11 minutes into the second quarter on Saturday, that the Hawks medical team wanted to send him to hospital after half-time.

Croad's wife, Tanya, intervened and argued to let him stay and Croad himself told them: "I'm not going anywhere. I didn't get to Fed Square with the boys and I wasn't celebrating with them today and I won't be going to Tassie so it will be nice to finally have a few drinks with them."

Still he was there to get his medal and join teammates on his crutches back in the centre of the MCG around 7.30pm on Saturday where they linked up in a circle and sang the club song.

"This one particular two hours of football will unite us all as friends for the rest of our lives," said Croad yesterday. "It doesn't matter what happens now — who gets traded or retires or moves on — we will have this forever."

There were so many emotional moments for this emotional footballer back out in the middle of the ground shortly before the presentations began. Croad's longest hug was reserved for Shane Crawford, the captain who told the confused and — in Croad's words — far-too-media-friendly young player, "Just play well. Just play good football".

But the most poignant embrace involved Luke Hodge, the hard-edged Colac superstar who came to the club in 2002 in an exchange for the shellshocked Croad. "I whispered in his ear as I was biting on his ear, 'We did it bro'. Then there was this brief but comfortable silence when one man looks at another and knows how much it all means."

Croad said his heart was bursting when Hodge's name was called as the 2008 Norm Smith medallist. "Luke's my closest mate at the club. We were traded for each other as young kids and when I came back we were All-Australian together and now we are young fathers together.

"We have this conspiracy theory that I had to go away and do time for him (Croad's nickname for Hodge is 'Juddy' while Hodge, in return calls him 'Pav'), but when we're being serious he knows what I think. He had it tough for a time too when people were always comparing him to Juddy.

"I've wanted to say this to him and I've said it to his face. I couldn't have been shipped away for a better person for the impact he has had on me and on this football club."

Croad, who barracked for Hawthorn from the time he moved to Australia as a nine-year-old New Zealander and joined the club as a 17-year-old De La Salle College VCE student, still finds it hard to articulate how he felt the day he learnt he was being traded to Fremantle in a deal that involved the No. 1 draft choice that eventually selected Hodge.

"We had played in a preliminary final in 2001 and I went into hospital for surgery on my hand and the day I came out … seven days later I was living on the other side of the country. I was in shock for a long time. I can still remember my mum hiding in the bushes at the protest the fans had at Glenferrie Oval."

Croad returned to Hawthorn two years later in a deal orchestrated by the club's former football manager John Hook. It was a quieter, more conservative footballer who became an ultra-reliable defender and finished runner-up in the best-and-fairest that season and became All-Australian alongside Hodge in 2004.

"Do you remember when you were 17?" Croad responded when asked what had forced the image change. "You arrive in a club and you see Jason Dunstall and Paul Salmon, and Chris Langford gives you his jumper. You have to go through the ebb and flow of football to tell your own story. I had to learn to shut up and get on with it."