Danny Gosset: Cancer survivor enjoying Caernarfon’s Euro push

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.