Jos Hooiveld finds no room for sentiment

Remember Jos Hooiveld when he arrived at Celtic? Couldn't stop him talking, couldn't write quickly enough to record all the interesting things he had to say.

• Jos Hooiveld warms up in the Galgangenwaard Stadium in Utrecht last night as Celtic are put through their paces ahead of tonight's Europa League return, leading 2-0 from the first leg Picture: Alan Harvey/SNS

When you heard that the Dutchman was coming for a chat then you whipped the notebook open and just prayed that you had enough blank sheets to house his views. He was the rarest of beasts; an Old Firm player with opinions and eloquence. All hail, Jos. The centre-half who never stopped giving.

They got to Jos, though. Inevitable, really. Most Old Firm players have an operation performed on them when they get overly talkative in the press and it's obvious Jos is no different. They did a quotectomy on him somewhere along the line. Yanked out the bits of him that made him so quoteable and tossed them in a skip.

He sat down for a natter yesterday on the way to Utrecht and you could tell he was the same engaging fella he always was - plenty of smiles, lots of politeness - but he was just holding himself back. Not totally, mind. There is a very large personality trapped inside that Celtic tracksuit. There is a whole load of determination, you feel. He plays all that stuff down. Says that if he plays against Utrecht this evening then he'll just treat it like any other game. As if.

Hooiveld is the perfect story for today. A Dutchman largely ignored in his own land, who had to go to foreign fields for recognition - which has been slow in coming - and who says he feels like "a stranger in his own country."

A stranger!

You should have been at the press conference in Utrecht. A few Dutch journalists quizzed him about what it was like coming home. Hooiveld sat there and didn't play along. Home? Holland, he said, was home in the sense that he was born here, but home from home is what matters to him now.

Glasgow is where it's at.

You'll see glimpses of the old Jos reappearing, little snippets of his charisma clashing here and there with his alter ego of 'just one of the boys' offering platitudes.

"You must be looking forward to the Utrecht game, Jos. Proving the Dutch doubters wrong, eh?"

"No, I have nothing to prove to anybody in Holland. I want to prove myself to people at Celtic more than I want to prove myself to anybody in Holland."

Not a bad start, right? "You feel bad you didn't have a proper career in Holland?"

"No, no. That's not the way I am."

"What happened to you back then?"

"Nothing happened. They had questions and I had to leave."

"Ah, questions about your ability and your attitude, perhaps?"

"No. I don't know. It was quite strange. It's a strange football country, Holland. If they believe in you, they believe in you, if they don't, they don't. If you're not in the right place, it's going down fast. I believed in me or else I would have stopped. I believed I could pull it off."

We haven't seen the best of Hooiveld, presuming that he has plenty of his best left to give. Inury has hampered him and it's safe to say that his time at Celtic hasn't really worked out just yet. There's a bit of a battle going on at centre-half now, of course. Now that Neil Lennon has cleared out some of his options he has only got three likely candidates left; Hooiveld, his countryman, Glenn Loovens, and the Swede, Daniel Majstorovic.

In truth, there's only one spot available, because neither Hooiveld nor Loovens nor the presence of a large JCB would shift Majstorovic from the team, so the Dutchmen are up against each other, with Hooiveld the current favourite to emerge on top.

If Hooiveld is selected tonight then it's going to be the most important evening of his brief Celtic career. Utrecht showed in Glasgow that they have enough heavy artillery to trouble Lennon's men, enough creative players to cause problems to a Celtic defence that is still bedding-in. No way is this tie done and dusted.

"Utrecht made three good chances at Parkhead, Jos. You reckon they're bound to score one this time around?"

"They play quite good football. They look for space between the lines. Have some good quality. It'll be hard to stop them."

"Will you be one of the guys doing the stopping? You and big Daniel?"

"I don't know. If I'm there, I'll see what I can do."

"Hmm. Do you know any of the Utrecht players?"

"No, no."

"Been in the stadium?"

"Yeah, once. I was sitting on the bench. When I was younger. The fans were fanatical. Not aggressive, but...emotional."

The Hooiveld family are in Utrecht in numbers for this tie tonight, a tie that Hooiveld thinks Celtic will survive. He thinks their legs are stronger and their understanding greater than it was when they went to Braga. And we all saw on Tuesday night what a good side Braga turned out to be. Suddenly, their victory over the Portuese at Celtic looks a really fine result.

How good are Celtic? Well, we don't have much longer to wait to find out more clues. Utrecht are no European giants but they'd still represent a very decent scalp, an endorsement of Lennon's regime and a confirmation that

Hooiveld, when injury-free, has something to offer at the heart of the defence.

"I'm more excited now than I was last week and next week I'll be more excited again," he says. "As long as we win."

So says Jos, a great Old Firm orator who still has something to say, despite the operation..

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