Craig Gordon is football’s Andy Murray and only a fool would write off Hearts warrior making history – Ryan Stevenson

“Most people would quit and give up in my situation right now. But I’m not ‘most people’ and my mind works differently. I won’t quit. I will keep fighting and working to produce the performances I know I’m capable of.”

Those are Andy Murray’s words but they could easily have come from the mouth of Craig Gordon. Murray came out fighting last week as he slapped down suggestions it was time to hang up his racket or risk “tarnishing” his legacy. I know there were plenty of people who thought Gordon should have packed away his gloves after that horror double leg break he suffered at Tannadice back on Christmas Eve, 2022.

At 39, surely there was no way for him to come back for such a devastating blow, they said. But Craig is to Scottish football what Murray is to tennis, a warrior determined to bow out on his own terms. And hopefully those terms include him becoming Scotland’s oldest ever player.

The goalkeeper now has that honour for Hearts and having signed a new one-year Hearts deal, the big man – who turns 42 next New Year’s Eve – is hoping to recover both his place for club and country. And you’d be mad to bet against him achieving it.

Anyone who has watched Murray’s Amazon Prime doc on his battle to recover from major hip surgery will have seen the endless hours of toil and graft the double Wimbledon champion put himself through during his long rehab process as he fought to save his career. And you can be certain Gordon has faced a very similar journey himself on the road back to first-team action.

It will have been a long, lonely trudge through endless gym sessions as he worked to rebuild his shattered leg. There will have been days when he’ll have felt like s***e, but marched on through, days when he was sore all over