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.<\/p>\n
“You’ve read the information leaflet,” Jannoun told the injured Hearts and Scotland goalkeeper.<\/p>\n
“You could get paralysis, you could die\u2026”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Gordon says his entire career has been a series of comebacks, a litany of fights against the odds.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In March this year, Craig Gordon travelled to London to see a man called Usamah Jannoun, a spine…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":491106,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-491105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=491105"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491105\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/491106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=491105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=491105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=491105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}