Risk of death to oldest man at World Cup - walking miracle Gordon

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."

'I cried about how much it meant to everybody'

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.