The Rangers doctor who saved Craig Gordon's career - and why he went to Celtic instead of Ibrox

Gordon has signed up for another year at Hearts and with Scotland and will celebrate his 43rd birthday on New Year's Eve. By that point, he could be looking forward to a World Cup next summer depending how the national team fares in qualifying. It would be quite the feat for a goalkeeper who has suffered broken bones and serious knee injuries in a decorated stint with Hearts, Sunderland and Celtic.

His exploits will be celebrated at his testimonial match at Tynecastle next month when the Black Cats visit the Jambos. The man himself admitted to The Scotsman earlier this month that he has had two careers, with the middle part in 2010 and 2011 spent rehabbing and desperately trying to find a way to cure his knee issue.

Step forward an unlikely salvation in then Rangers medic Steven Walker, who used the experience to treat a similar injury on a Norwegian player called Thomas Kind Bendiksen to assist Gordon on his way back to professional football. Without a club, Gordon was training with the Ibrox side, who at that point were working their way back to the top flight following liquidation.

"I spent the first year out not really doing very much," recalled Gordon. “I probably thought for that first year that I wouldn't play again, until the beginning of the second season where my knee started to feel a little bit better.

“When I went into Rangers, I worked with Steven Walker, the physio there, and he was really good with me. He spent a bit of time trying to figure out how I could rehab my knee without it hurting, giving me exercises that I could do that were less painful but were still building up my leg, and just his thought process around the injury.

“That's something that I’ve taken away from there and always been mindful of if I've had any other injuries, is how can I work around it. How can I strengthen without causing the injury any more hassle. He was the guy that worked out how to get me back."

Gordon was given a recommendation to seek guidance from Walker and it clearly paid off. “It was from Jim Stewart, who had been a goalkeeping coach at Hearts and Scotland, and he was at Rangers at the time," continued Gordon. “Rangers had already rehabbed a guy with a very similar injury with me. I think it was a Norwegian guy. He didn't really play much in the first team. He went back to Norway, I think, and he'd managed to get him back from a very similar injury.

“He'd come in to see if he could help, and he did. So that would be the guy I would credit with helping the most. I went and got all different injections. I had PRP injections over in Barcelona with the guy that Pep Guardiola sends his players to. I had high volume injections in London. I had all the different treatments I could possibly do to chuck everything at it, but if it's one person, I would say it would be him.

“He was able to devise a programme that enabled me to build up the muscle around my knee to take the load off the tendon. I think it was a kind of unusual injury at the time. I think there's more of them happened since, but he was the one that managed to get the programme that actually worked.

“It was just purely work, long term. It was over a number of months of starting off really slow, of doing a high volume of very low weight exercise to eventually build it up over a really long period of time to get back.

“It might have got better over time, but I gave it everything that I had to get back. Once I realised there was a chance to get back, I poured everything into it to give myself that one last opportunity to get to the bottom of it. If I didn't get back, then I knew I'd given it absolutely everything.

“If I gave it one more go and still couldn't get back, then I would have retired and been at peace with that decision. Until I'd given it everything one last time, I probably would have always wondered if I could have. So between that and the determination to get back, that was the kind of factors that helped."

Why I signed for Celtic not Rangers

The irony of the work with the Rangers physio is that once fit. Gordon ended up joining Celtic - where he went on to win 12 trophies.

“Rangers were in League One at the time and they already had two senior goalkeepers," explained Gordon. “To add another one at that stage probably wasn't financially the right thing for them to do.

“They wanted me to play in a couple of reserve games to prove that I was fit enough to stay. If I had done that, then my injury insurance would have been invalid. So I couldn't do that. That was the reason why that never happened.

“Then it was about looking for a club and I didn't know what level I could get back. I spoke to Raith Rovers, they were interested. Hearts had Jamie Macdonald here at the time, they didn't know if he was going to be leaving. I think Neil Alexander came in.

“Then Celtic came in. So that was the the reason I went there. I knew I wasn't going to be first choice when I first went in with Fraser Forster being there. But I knew I'd have, again, really good medical care. I could give it the best possible chance to continue my rehab and try and get some games.

“I knew there was obviously speculation about Fraser, so there was a little chink of light there to potentially him moving on and getting a chance to see what I could do. As you say, your sliding doors moment, it all fell into place all in exactly the right time. I managed to go in and play 50 games my first season back after not playing for two years, which I didn't know was possible until I managed to do it.

“At certain times as a footballer you've got to be a bit selfish and go and do the thing that's best for you, and that was the best thing for me, for my career, to play at the highest level.

“Rangers took another three years to come to the Premier League, so I managed to get those three years playing in the Premier League and playing for Scotland that perhaps maybe I wouldn't have had. “It was a difficult thing to do but sometimes you've got to do what's best."

Hearts and Scotland will no doubt be delighted with the course of events. Thanks to that spell across both sides of the Old Firm divide, Gordon is still going strong.

Tickets for the Craig Gordon Testimonial Match – Hearts v Sunderland, Tynecastle Park, 3pm, Saturday 26th July – are on sale now through heartsfc.co.uk. Supporters can keep up to date with all of the latest Craig Gordon Testimonial information at craiggordontestimonial.co.uk