Craig Gordon: From risk of death to oldest man at World Cup

In March this year, Craig Gordon travelled to London to see a man called Usamah Jannoun, a spine doctor who didn’t sugarcoat the risks involved in the treatment the 43-year-old needed to fix a neck injury.

“You’ve read the information leaflet,” Jannoun told the injured Hearts and Scotland goalkeeper.

“You could get paralysis, you could die…”

From there to here – in Charlotte, North Carolina getting ready for a World Cup that must have seemed like an impossible dream only a few short months ago.

Behind-the-scenes footage of Gordon talking to Jannoun features in Icons of Football, a BBC Scotland documentary on Gordon’s life and times, available on BBC iPlayer from Wednesday at 06:00 BST. It’s by turns emotional, harrowing and inspirational.

Gordon says his entire career has been a series of comebacks, a litany of fights against the odds.

Through a succession of serious injuries – ankle issues, broken arms, broken leg, knee surgeries, neck and shoulder problems – he has missed an estimated 1,975 days of football or around 200 games. Way back in 2012 he suffered patellar tendonitis, a career-threatening condition that kept him out for two years.

He visited experts in Sweden and Spain, had three surgeries and visited a psychologist because his club at the time – Sunderland – thought the pain that left him in major difficulty when trying to climb the stairs or walk down the street might have been all in his head. It was not.

A surgeon advised Gordon to retire. He decided to carry on. From 2012 to 2014 he played no football. He was the forgotten man, cast into a recurring nightmare of rehab and hope.

“I suppose I try and hide it,” he says of the upset caused by all the physical trauma. “There are definitely times where I’ve cried because of injury. I just probably don’t show it to everybody else.”