Hearts' Craig Gordon speaks for the first time on his Scotland Euro 2024 pain - and his international future

SNS Group

As Scotland laboured on the field in Germany last month, Craig Gordon was at home in Edinburgh nursing one of the biggest disappointments of his career. It took the Hearts goalkeeper weeks to overcome the devastation of missing out on the European Championship. Even when reporting back to Riccarton for pre-season training, the hurt still hadn’t completely healed.

Steve Clarke’s decision to leave Gordon out of Scotland’s final 26-man squad for the finals hit the 41-year-old hard. He was determined to remain professional, staying with the squad to play in the final pre-tournament friendly against Finland. Inside, he was distraught. The previous 17 months had been spent fighting like a lion to recover from a double leg-break in the twilight of his career, partly because he was desperate to make it to Euro 2024. Instead, Angus Gunn, Liam Kelly and his Hearts team-mate Zander Clark were chosen and Gordon stayed at home.

For the first time since that crushing conversation at the team hotel in early June, Gordon has opened up on his personal anguish. He is preparing for the new club season and is finally over the distress of missing the Euros. As ever, he is determined to turn the situation to his advantage by using it as motivation. “Yeah, absolutely. Any motivation you can get, you try to use to your advantage. That's what I've done before. Any setbacks I've had in my career, I try to bounce back. This is another one of those,” he explained.

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“I was disappointed and it took me a few weeks to get over it. I was probably even into pre-season with Hearts before I really managed to put that behind me, move on and start to focus on this one. That's the good thing about football, you get another season or the next game to try and focus on. I've tried to put all my energy into making myself as good as I can be for the start of the season.”

He relayed some of his emotions when asked to recall the moment Clarke delivered the news. “It was emotional, as you can imagine, for both of us. It's not a nice situation for anybody to be in,” said Gordon. “I felt I had trained really well. When I was there with Scotland I felt very fit towards the end of last season. I think I've continued that into this season and built on it, but I felt I was in a good place to really go there and challenge.

“The manager made the call that he was going to go with the other three keepers. That's what the manager gets paid to do. I accepted the decision and wished them all the best. I stayed with the squad for another day or so after that and took part in the Finland game. It wasn't a nice situation. You never want to go through that in your career, but at times these things happen. You have to bounce back. It's how you deal with that as a person. I thought I dealt with it the right way in and around the squad. That's all you can do in that situation.”

Anyone assuming that Gordon’s Scotland career is now over should perhaps not jump to conclusions. The man himself is ruling nothing out, even in his early 40s. The primary aim is to re-establish himself at Hearts and see whether an international call comes thereafter.

“Who knows? Anything can happen in football,” he said. “At this moment in time, I'm just looking to the next week and making sure I'm available to play. That's all I can control. If I can get in the team and get a run of games at Hearts, you never know what can happen: Injuries to other goalkeepers, who is playing, who is getting game time. You can never tell.”

There are no immediate plans to announce international retirement. “At this moment in time, it's too early to make any decisions. I'll wait and see how the beginning of the season pans out and how I feel moving forward, if it's something that I'm still capable of doing. At the moment, I feel good.”

Look out for the second part of our exclusive Craig Gordon interview later this week.

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