Former Collingwood runner Alex Woodward, whose two-game AFL career was derailed by five ACL injuries, says he had “hundreds” of people telling him to take his own life after his infamous blunder in the 2018 grand final.

After five years and three ACLs at Hawthorn, Woodward joined the Magpies’ VFL program in 2017, refusing to let his AFL dream die.

WATCH THE VIDEO ABOVE: Alex Woodward recounts infamous 2018 grand final blunder.

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He suffered two more devastating ACL injuries before finally pulling the pin on his playing days, but he did find a new role as one of the club’s AFL gameday runners.

Sadly, he is now remembered best for the one error he made in that role than for anything else he did during his time in the game.

With less than seven minutes left on the clock in the third quarter of the 2018 decider, as Collingwood clung onto a dwindling four-point lead, Woodward inadvertently blocked his own player Jaidyn Stephenson from accessing a ball kicked by Taylor Adams that landed in the lap of West Coast star Elliot Yeo.

After accepting the fortuitous uncontested mark 45 metres out and directly in front of goal, the Eagles champion went back and drilled it to give West Coast the lead.

The Eagles would go on to win the game by five points.

Speaking openly to What Could’ve Been about the infamous moment, Woodward says he still has Magpies fans talk to him about it, seven years later.

“Every now and then if I’m at a Collingwood game, people might recognise me for the wrong thing,” Woodward said.

“My personality is I’ll have a chat with them. Rather than say something behind my back, tell me how you feel.

“I’ll try and have a chat with them and have a conversation around it. (It) disarms them.”

Listen to What Could’ve Been with Alex Woodward below, or subscribe on Spotify, Apple, or watch on YouTube.

Recounting the moment in vivid detail, Woodward remembers the moment he realised he was caught in the firing line.

“I thought I was in a great spot in terms of (being) away from the play,” he said.

“I thought Tay (Adams) was going to go down the line, it was obviously in the back pocket. I thought this ball was no chance to come to me, I thought I’d positioned myself pretty well.

“But sometimes AFL players go for those kicks, so I needed to be more alert, and that’s something I definitely own.

“I was sort of running and then I look up and this red footy’s right in line with me, coming directly at me.

“And we’re sort of taught if you want to get out of the way of the play, you just run in a direction, and you just commit to the direction you’re running in, rather than zig-zagging or trying to dodge people, so that’s what I did — I just put my head down and ran to the other forward pocket.

“I was just trying to get out of the way, but I didn’t know Jaidyn was behind me. I don’t know if he would’ve impacted that or not.”

It’s the eternal unknown that can never be answered, and made for an easy scapegoat on which to pin the blame of the loss for Collingwood fans.

But for as much as the Magpie army might have been angry, no one was hurting more than Woodward himself, who was just 26 years of age at the time.

“I didn’t really know what else I could’ve done in that moment,” he said.

“I don’t know if Tay connected perfectly with the kick, so it was almost like I couldn’t really have predicted the ball coming that way.

“But yeah, I was jogging off and I could sort of hear 100,000 people going, ‘Oh... oh, s***’. I’m in bloody bright pink as well, so it’s hard not to see me.

“After the game it sort of all sunk in. For me, as soon as the siren went and all of the Collingwood players have to sit on the ground and watch all the Eagles players get their medals, I just had my head in my hands, I think it was 22 minutes or something, I just didn’t look up, because I was just internalising, processing everything.

“And then on the way off I started getting pretty upset about it and I went straight to one of the locker rooms in the MCG where they keep all the food, and I just locked myself in there with one of my mates who came down.”

Famous pictures thereafter showed then-Collingwood coach Nathan Buckley consoling Woodward, who was in tears in the changerooms.

“Bucks came in, credit to him, he put his arms around me really quickly, and there’s footage of that as well, because that was just before I went into the little cabinet area. I just went straight back in there, and he got around me again and just took all the blame off me,” Woodward said.

“It was probably the onslaught afterwards that I wasn’t really prepared for, and nothing that I’d really been exposed to at that point of my life.

“Keyboard warriors and these people online where there’s no real filter can say what they like and there’s no real consequence.

“The worst of it was enough to bother me.

“It was sort of before a time where it was getting called out as well. If someone says something now, it gets put on X or put on Instagram and it’s shared everywhere, and it sort of cancels them straight away. I was fighting my own battles for a while.”

Amid the horrific abuse Woodward copped in the aftermath of the game, he maintained an extraordinary level of composure, even replying to some of the people who were telling him to take his own life.

“My best action was to own it; I made a mistake, so I’m going to own it, take it in my stride,” he said.

“I wouldn’t say it was pleasant knowing there was messages in my DMs and emails and stuff saying I should unalive myself, that type of stuff. Multiple, hundreds of people — it was in the hundreds.

“You might think I’m a bit crazy, but some of them I just replied to. I just replied to them saying, and this is as simple as it was, but I said, ‘I’m sorry that you feel that way, I’ll try be better’, and that was basically the gist of it. Almost like disarming them again.

“A lot of them actually came back with an apology, which is not what I was asking for, I just wanted it to stop.

“That was my approach — I wouldn’t really recommend it to everyone, because it is a little bit different, but that’s how I handled it.

“The frustrating part was some of those messages were from people I knew. Whether I met through work or school, social stuff. So those ones I wasn’t as kind with the response.”