Jodi Jones stood at Wembley with the play-off trophy in his hands, holding back tears, and spoke about 1,900 days of dreaming. For nearly five years, he had imagined a moment like this one—a moment when his body would cooperate, when a football pitch would feel like home again, when he could finally be the player he was always meant to be. On Monday, against Salford City, all of that came true in a single, virtuoso performance that helped Notts County win 3-0 and secure promotion back to League One.
The 28-year-old winger was man of the match, a decision so obvious that even the opposing managers—Gillingham's Gareth Ainsworth and Bromley's Andy Woodman—agreed immediately. Jones was everywhere that mattered: involved in two of the first-half goals and scoring the third himself, a promotion-sealing strike that capped off what he called "one of the best days in my footballing career." But what made the performance extraordinary was the distance he had traveled to stand on that pitch at all.
Three anterior cruciate ligament injuries had nearly destroyed Jones's career. Between November 2017 and August 2021, while playing for Coventry City, he underwent three ACL operations and missed 897 days of football—130 games gone, years that many athletes never recover from. He went more than five years without starting a league match. The injuries came during his time at Coventry in League Two, and that darkness stretched across loan spells, failed comebacks, and the kind of limbo where you stop knowing if you'll ever play again. Yet Coventry stuck with him, offering contract after contract when they could have moved on, when Jones himself might have surrendered.
"Tough times, I can only thank my family and Coventry for sticking by me," Jones said, his voice wavering as he held the trophy. "They gave me contract after contract when I could have been down and out." In January 2023, Oxford United sent him on loan to Notts County in the National League. It was a chance to start over at a club with deep history—a massive club, as he kept saying, one of English football's oldest institutions. Within two seasons, he had helped deliver two promotions.
This was Jones's third major triumph at Wembley. He had been on Coventry's books when they won the EFL Trophy in 2017 and the League Two play-offs in 2018. Last year, he scored a penalty in the National League promotion final shootout against Chesterfield. Now he had this—a League Two play-off final victory that sent Notts County toward the Championship, their 14th promotion in EFL history.
The numbers tell part of the story: 10 goals this season for Notts, but more strikingly, 24 assists that broke a record previously shared by Thierry Henry and Kevin de Bruyne. In 2024, he was named League Two player of the year. Yet none of those statistics capture what it means to watch a player who spent nearly two thousand days dreaming about moments like Monday finally get to live one out loud, on one of English football's greatest stages, with a family and a club who never stopped believing he would return.