From risk of death to the 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."

Gordon, 43, made his Scotland debut more than 22 years ago, before three members of the current World Cup squad - Ben Gannon-Doak, Findlay Curtis and Tyler Fletcher - were born and when Aaron Hickey was just a year old. The film covers all of that.

"There was definitely a worry it was something that was going to be longer term, not only in football, but also for the rest of my life," Gordon says about the neck problems that put his World Cup in serious jeopardy.

Filmed in real time, he talks about the choice he faced: "Continuing [trying to play] or whether I need to look at the rest of my life and think, 'No, I need to be in a good enough state to play with the kids, to make sure they're getting brought up with a dad that can play with them and be active and do the things that they want to do'."

If there was no World Cup, it is likely there would have been a retirement by now. "I think I'd have probably called it quits at the end of last season," Gordon says.

Proving people wrong has been his thing - club managers, surgeons, media, fans and Steve Clarke, who readily admits he thought he had ended Gordon's international career when he left him out of the last Euros.

Injury and the form of Hearts' Alexander Schwolow means Gordon only played six times - three for his club and three for his country - in the season just ended. One of them stands head and shoulders above all others - the 4-2 victory over Denmark in November that propelled Scotland into their first World Cup in 28 years.

"I was emotional," he says of that extraordinary night at Hampden. "I definitely cried in my room about that, about how much it meant to everybody.

"I can still feel it now. I was super focused in that game to the point where Scott McTominay scored one of the best goals I've ever seen in my life and I didn't even react. I just walked back to my six-yard box and got ready for the restart.

"They equalised, we scored again, they equalised again. It was starting to look like more glorious failure. Kieran [Tierney] puts the ball in the top corner from the edge of the box and, again, I just walked back. Went straight back to my goal, thinking we've got five minutes now. I need to keep the ball out of the net. If I'm celebrating, I'm not clear in what I'm doing.

"I nearly didn't play this season. I was thinking about going at the end of last season, so to qualify for a World Cup. Wow. That was one last effort. One last goal. And it's come off."

He says the World Cup is "almost definitely" the end. It's nip and tuck between Gordon and Angus Gunn for a starting place against Haiti on Saturday. Gunn is the current favourite, but if the past two decades have told us anything about Gordon it's that you write him off at your peril.

This is probably the most resilient footballer Scotland has ever produced, a man who has endured a physical and mental buffeting without ever breaking.

Gordon is the oldest player at the 2026 tournament and if he gets game time he will become the second-oldest player in World Cup history, a walking miracle to the last.