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CONNOR GOLDSON’S dad Winston must have had mixed emotions when his son scored the only goal of the game at the Amex on New Year’s Day 2016.
The avid Wolverhampton Wanderers fan in him would have been delighted to see his side leave the south coast with three valuable Championship points.
Unfortunately, Wolverhampton-born Connor was playing for Brighton that day – just his second game in the blue and white stripes.
What made it worse was that the defender had been on Wanderers’ books for five years as a young boy but was released when he was only 13.
Goldson must have been mortified when, in the 32nd-minute of that first game of 2016, he inadvertently diverted Jordan Graham’s cross past David Stockdale in the home goal.
Sure, injury-hit Albion had chances to restore parity or even win, but 11th-placed Wolves hung on to the lead and Chris Hughton’s luckless Seagulls saw a winless run extend to six games.
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Albion also lost the next two matches but got back on track with a 1-0 win at Blackburn on 16 January and then pushed hard for an automatic promotion slot.
For Goldson, that fixture marked the start of a run of games alongside Lewis Dunk, and his first goal for the club came in a 2-1 away win at Birmingham City on 5 April, when he glanced in a Jiri Skalak set-piece delivery.
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He found the net again a fortnight later with a towering header from a corner as the Seagulls crushed QPR 4-0 at the Amex to edge closer to the top two (Burnley and Middlesbrough) with three games to go.
The centre-back partnership was only broken up when Dunk was shown a red card in the penultimate game, a 1-1 draw at Derby, and suspended for the final game of the ordinary league season.
Goldson was alongside returning skipper Gordon Greer for the crucial away game at Middlesbrough on 7 May when the 1-1 draw meant Boro, equal on 89 points, pipped the Albion to automatic promotion by virtue of having scored two more goals.
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With Albion forced to endure the play-offs, Goldson’s involvement in the Seagulls’ bid to overcome Sheffield Wednesday cruelly came to a premature end when the centre-back was forced off injured before half-time in the first leg at Hillsborough, and Albion eventually succumbed 2-0.
The injury prevented Goldson being involved in the second leg when Dunk scored but Wednesday somehow managed a 1-1 draw to thwart Albion’s progress.
If that was a blow, it was the least of the troubles the defender would have to overcome the following season.
Frustrating though it was that Brighton brought in Shane Duffy to partner Dunk in the centre of defence, Goldson’s brief spell back in the side in early 2017 came to a juddering halt when a routine scan discovered a heart defect that required surgery.
Then it wasn’t just his football career that was under threat, but his life was in danger if urgent action wasn’t taken to operate on the swollen aorta the tests uncovered.
It has since emerged that Winston suffered a heart attack aged only 35 and Goldson’s grandfather had died of a heart problem.
The required “preventative surgery” took place at the Royal Brompton Hospital, Chelsea, leaving him with a scar down the middle of his chest. His best friend in football and former Shrewsbury teammate, Jon Taylor, told The Athletic: “He thought the worst about not playing again. He was struggling. When I saw him in the hospital it was horrible.”
Taylor was among several former Shrews people Scottish football writer Jordan Campbell spoke to for an extended article about Goldson published by The Athletic in March 2021.
“I made a T-shirt for him before a game which said ‘Stay Strong Con’. That gave him a little bit of a boost but he’s got a great family around him,” said Taylor, who is now at Doncaster. “When he had the op, and he knew he could play again, his mentality was, ‘How quickly can I get back?’. Even as young lads at Wolves we knew his mindset was second to none.”
Campbell reported how once Goldson had come to terms with the situation, he was determined to get back playing regularly, and just 15 weeks after the operation he took part in a pre-season friendly match in Austria. In a changed second half team, he lined up alongside Uwe Hünemeier against Fortuna Dusseldorf.
Physio Chris Skitt, who’d nurtured Goldson through physical issues when he was developing at Shrewsbury, said: “If I talk to kids and they say, ‘What does it take to be a professional footballer?’, I use Connor as the example.”
With a surname that lent itself so readily to the Spandau Ballet classic Gold, the “indestructible” line in the lyrics was a natural for Albion’s singing fans to pick up on.
But at the end of August 2017, on transfer deadline day, it looked certain Goldson would continue his rehabilitation into league football with a season-long loan move to Ipswich Town.
He was manager Mick McCarthy’s main target, but Albion pulled the plug on the deal at the last minute because of the collapse of a separate deal for centre-back cover they’d hoped to complete.
Goldson played in League Cup matches against Barnet and AFC Bournemouth but it wasn’t until December that he finally got his chance to feature in Albion’s debut Premier League season – and he turned in a Man of the Match performance as the Seagulls beat Watford 1-0 at the Amex.
He played in three games in January: FA Cup matches against Crystal Palace and Middlesbrough (2-1 and 1-0 wins), and the 4-0 home defeat to a rampant Chelsea.
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As Albion progressed to the fifth round of the FA Cup, Goldson once again got a start, alongside Hünemeier, as Albion beat Coventry City 3-1 at the Amex.
His last league game in an Albion shirt was as a 71st-minute substitute for Duffy in a 4-0 reverse away to Liverpool on the final day of the season.
During the close season, Goldson seized on the chance to play for his boyhood hero Steven Gerrard, who had just been appointed manager of Glasgow Rangers. Gerrard drove all the way to Brighton for face-to-face talks with Goldson and explained how he saw him as a cornerstone of the rebuilding job at Rangers.
The often magnanimous Hughton was not going to stand in his way and said on the club website: “Connor has done extremely well for the club in the three years he has been here, but he wants to play regular senior football, and at this stage we cannot give him that guarantee.
“He has been a great professional and a pleasure to work with – and he has shown a great mental strength to come through a very tough time after he underwent crucial heart surgery just over a year ago.”
Determined to seize the opportunity presented to him in Glasgow, Goldson remarkably played in 151 of 159 games Rangers took part in over the next three years; when he made his 150th appearance, it was the quickest any player had reached that landmark in the club’s history.
After Gerrard departed Rangers to take on the manager’s job at Aston Villa, Goldson indicated he wanted to make a move himself, although, at the time of writing, he remains in Glasgow.
Born on 18 December 1992, Goldson grew up on the same Wolverhampton estate as future Wanderers players Leon Clarke and Carl Ikeme.
As the son of a Wolves-mad dad, it was probably not surprising that his early footballing promise was nurtured with Wanderers. The family lived only a 10-minute car ride from Molineux.
“I was with Wolves from the age of eight until I was 13,” Goldson recalled in an Albion matchday programme article, explaining that he was in the same group as Jack Price and Ethan Ebanks-Landell, who both made it through to the first team.
“I was a striker until I was about 10 or 11, simply because I was the biggest and the quickest, but I was then converted into a centre-half,” he said. “When I got to under 14 level, the manager stopped playing me and so my dad and I made the decision to leave for Shrewsbury – and it was the best thing that could have happened to me.”
Shrewsbury fast-tracked Goldson through the groups and he was training with the first team by the time he was 16. He signed professional forms at 17 and made his first team debut the following year.
“I owe Shrewsbury a lot, both the first-team management and the coaches who brought me through,” he said.
In The Athletic feature, Skitt described in detail how Goldson went through a difficult physical development phase which in effect involved “putting him back together”.
The physio was responsible for resetting his body and created a specific programme comprised of core work, gym sessions and remedial work to counter the loss of power growth spurts were causing.
“We even tried to get him boxing to improve his footwork because of his canal boat shoes. He is a size 14 and they are absolutely honking,” said Skitt.
After successfully rebuilding his body, Goldson played 18 games at the start of the 2013-14 season under Graham Turner but only 11 were as a starter, so he went on a two-month loan to Cheltenham.
His loan was extended but he was recalled after first team coach and reserve team manager Mike Jackson (the chap who has taken over as caretaker Burnley manager following Sean Dyche’s sacking) was put in charge at Shrewsbury until the end of the season following Turner’s resignation. Goldson played every minute of the last 21 league games.
Shrews were relegated but the following season, under Micky Mellon, with Jackson as coach, Goldson was a key player as they bounced straight back: he won the club’s Player of the Year and Players’ Player of the Year awards and was named in the PFA Team of the Year.
Such recognition led to Brighton signing him, doubtless with half an eye on his replacing Greer, who was edging towards the end of his playing days with the Seagulls.
It was a while before Goldson got his chance and Greer admitted in The Athletic feature that the new boy’s frustration spilled over into a set-to with the skipper in training.
“Training finished and we went into the dressing room to find that the lads had laid out two sets of boxing gloves for a laugh with the Rocky music playing,” said Greer. “As soon it was over, though, it was done, as I liked Connor.”
And to show the hatchet had been well and truly buried, Goldson revealed that after he’d taken the captain’s place in the side, behind the scenes Greer had offered him encouragement and advice. “He’s been very helpful and supportive at the same time,” he said. “There are plenty of people who wouldn’t be like that, so I can’t speak highly enough of him.”
Goldson had to wait until 15 December 2015 to make his Albion debut, when he went on as a substitute for the injured Hünemeier against Middlesbrough. Unfortunately, the visitors emphatically ended Albion’s 21-game unbeaten run, winning 3-0.
That game was watched from the stands by Jose Mourinho, who’d just been deposed as Chelsea boss, catching up on the progress of his former Real Madrid colleague and Boro manager Aitor Karanka.
For the new young centre-back, the rise to playing in the Championship was all a learning experience, and he said: “I’ve been working with Colin Calderwood a lot, even after training, and as a former centre-back himself, he has put on a lot of good drills.”
Little did he know at the time there would be far greater challenges ahead.