"THERE is not much to do so I can't get myself into trouble." Kyle Lafferty delivers the line with a sheepish smile.

The striker is speaking about his new life in Turkey where he has pitched up to play for Rizespor on loan from Norwich City. The town of Rize on the Black Sea is said to be home to around 100,000 inhabitants but so far Lafferty is yet to find its high spots.

"Turkey is completely different from any place I've ever been," he adds. "I just went there to play football and try to stay fit for Northern Ireland. Where I'm living it's so quiet - I'm only training then heading back to the apartment."

If only he had done the same in Glasgow. Four years spent in Scotland's biggest city threw up plenty of opportunities for carousing and revelry and Lafferty did not turn away too many of them, while also getting himself embroiled in any number of needless spats. He dated, married then subsequently split from a Miss Scotland. He got himself involved in an angry Twitter exchange with Neil Lennon, then manager of rivals Celtic. He fell out with his own manager, Ally McCoist. On the field his behaviour wasn't exemplary either. He pretended he had been headbutted by Charlie Mulgrew to get the then Aberdeen player sent off, earning himself a retrospective two-game ban. He was sent off for a challenge that sparked a rammy in a game against Hibernian, and was lucky also not to get sent off for a wild tackle on Andreas Hinkel in an Old Firm game. It makes for a fairly inglorious list.

Back on Scottish soil ahead of tomorrow's friendly international at Hampden, Lafferty comes across as a picture of contrition. There are regrets, perhaps fuelled by the fact that he had a crack of making a name for himself at his boyhood heroes for the right reasons and never really took it. Or maybe more because his subsequent career path - Sion, Palermo, Norwich and now Rizespor - has made him realise that his lot at Rangers wasn't so bad after all. There is only so much summing up of a person's personality that can be achieved in a seven-minute interview but Lafferty, now 27 years old, does come across as someone who genuinely wishes he had done things differently.

"Moving to a club like Rangers - I think I was 20 at the time - was hard, especially coming from a wee village in Northern Ireland," he said. "So maybe it hit me. I'd be the first one to agree I did some daft things at Rangers, on and off the pitch. But it's all about learning from it and I've learned my lessons.

"I've matured, definitely. I realised that if you want to mess around then you need to follow it up with football. When I was at Rangers I didn't do that enough. But I've matured and I'm letting my football do the talking now. I'm enjoying it and that's what's most important.

"To play for a team like Rangers, to be known as the crazy guy on or off the pitch wasn't what I wanted. That wasn't who I wanted to be. In some ways it overshadowed all the good things I did for Rangers. I did score a few important goals but I'm probably most remembered as the guy who was given a chance and didn't take it. To score title-winning goals was a dream come true for me. But it's the things I did off the pitch, and the stupid things on it, that maybe take a bit of shine off all that."

While his club football remains in a state of flux, he is enjoying a rich vein of form at international level. Northern Ireland, like Scotland, stand on the brink of making a major championships for the first time in decades and Lafferty has been a big part of that, scoring in qualifying victories away to both Hungary and Greece. It has taken a while for him to gain cult hero status among his countrymen, although he is a bit coy about it all.

"It is early days yet although I've scored three goals in the last four," he added. "I just want to focus on my football and hopefully by the end of the campaign we are sitting pretty and have qualified. The table doesn't lie and we have been the second best team in the section so far. Michael [O'Neill, the Northern Ireland manager] has showed a lot of belief in me and I am out to repay him and the fans."