Cancer survivor Gosset enjoying Caernafon's Europe bid
Whatever happens this weekend, Danny Gosset will allow himself to look back at how far he has come since he stopped the car.
The aim on Saturday is to reach Europe as part of the Caernarfon side aiming to book trips abroad for the first time in the club’s history.
But the journey is perhaps more significant than the destination for the 29-year-old midfielder who went from worrying about an injury, to being told he had cancer.
“I remember the call like it was yesterday. I was driving and they told me to pull over and go straight to hospital,” Gosset recalls as he took the news from what was supposed to be a routine footballers’ scan.
“The cancer was eating away at my hip’s ball joint and they were scared the hip would break on me.
“That was the Friday. By the Monday I had started chemotherapy.”
What followed was a period Gosset says still “feels like a big nightmare that never really happened”, dark times he likens to “having a snake wrapped around my neck.”
The diagnosis was for non-Hodgkin lymphoma with Gosset being able to laugh at himself now for naively asking about when he could return to playing before eventually taking in its life-threatening gravity.
From Bangor, he had been a player in the EFL with Oldham before switching to Welsh football’s top-flight with Rhyl, The New Saints and Bangor, but it was at Bala where he finished the 2018-19 campaign frustrated with a nagging pain in his right hip. Over-training was cited, anti-inflammatories were provided.
“But I knew my own body, something wasn’t right,” he says in an interview with BBC Radio Wales Sport.
He credits the Bala physio at the time, Fiona Evans, for listening and arranging the scan which first detected the abnormality before the cancer was then confirmed and treatment began.
Even if successful, there was every chance the then 24-year-old would never return to the life he knew.
“The joint was like a honeycomb effect were it had been eaten away and they weren’t sure how the bone was going to react to treatment,” he says, with hip reconstruction a possibility. “The doctors said I would most likely not play again.”
Not that the former barber turned personal trainer allowed himself to accept that, especially when the mental and physical strain of chemotherapy had given him the all clear in January 2020, six months after that phone call in the car.
“Your mindset is your strongest asset,” he says. “There wasn’t much I could do physically, so I had to control the controllables, things like nutrition, but also changing my perspective.
“I would just visualise myself back playing at the highest level.”
Something he achieved in 2021, before moving to Caernarfon and playing a key role in the Cofis’ prediction-defying season that sees them take on Penybont for a place in the Europa Conference League.
There was a return to the Wales C set-up too, six years between caps, something he admits drove him on “not just for me, but for my family to see me back playing for my country.”
Now the opportunity for Europe, with its cash boost of almost £200,000 to the north Wales club and the obvious prestige. A sell-out Oval, a pressurised game, but one Gosset says – with more authority than most - is a privilege to play in.
“What happened changed me as a person,” he says, though adding it is for the better and beyond the “mental scars” from his diagnosis and treatment he admits still linger.
“My perspective on life and in general changed to try and slow down, be present and enjoy the moment a lot a more. When something gets taken away from you, and everything I went through, to be back playing just means so much more.
“I think I’m playing my best football and we’ve had a great season as a team, so to get to Europe would be amazing.
“Yes, it would be a great personal achievement for me, but it would mean so much for all of Caernarfon Town, the fans, the people and volunteers that work so hard around the club that you don’t really see.
“But if we can get over the line, I will take a moment, just to look back.”
Listen to the full interview on Radio Wales Sport tonight from 1900 BST, or later on demand.
