ESMAEL GONCALVES has a reassurance for those who like their one-time playboy footballers to be more professional and yet retain that devilment which made them such a terracing hero in the first place.

The new Hearts signing revealed he is “not boring but calmer” as he looked forward to his new life in Edinburgh following him signing a contract until 2020 after his £170,000 move from Anorthosis Famagusta was finalised on Monday night.

Hearts also signed midfielder Alexandros Tziolis, freed by PAOK Salonica, and centre-half Anastasios Avlonitis who left Olympiakos in September until the end of this season. That makes it nine new faces brought in by Ian Cathro in January and Goncalves is by far the most intriguing.

He is best remembered in Scotland for his brief, successful and entertaining spell at St Mirren, where he first worked with Austin McPhee, the assistant to Cathro who he first encountered in Portugal with Rio Ave, so both men know what they have let themselves in for.

Goncalves, 25, is a talent and was instrumental in St Mirren winning the 2013 League Cup. The Portuguese was also known as a man who liked a night out. A life of sobriety and contemplation was not for this big lad

“I am very different,” he claimed yesterday while laughing, most likely at the memory of a past misadventure. “At that time I was young. I didn’t care about how I lived my life

“Now I have a wife, I have a baby, it is a different life. Now it is just about the football. I am ready to settle. It is the right moment. Why did I not settle before? I was a young guy. I didn’t think ‘I must do this thing right’ I just did the things I did. I didn’t think about the choices I made.

“Now it is different. I think about football, I think about my family and when I made this choice I spoke with them – and I made the right choice.”

We all have to grow up some time and there came a time when even this tearaway decided that the quiet life was for him.

“It was the moment I met my girlfriend (Lucia ) and then I had my baby boy (Santiago) I started to think that I must stop doing these crazy things and begin to think more like a man, not like a boy,” said Goncalves.

“There was the football also. You do come to a moment when you think it’s now or never. You can have talent, you can be amazing and have everything you want, but if you don’t have your head in the right place then you will never achieve anything.

“A lot of people told me to stop what I was doing, to be clever and think about your life. I never listened and then came a point when I thought ‘this has to stop and I have to start working.’”

Cathro must be tempted to start Goncalves against Rangers tonight at Tynecastle in a game the Hearts manager could do with winning.

“I have seen lot of Rangers and I think they have added good players,” said Cathro. “The players they have added tells us they are absolutely committed to the way that they play. They have qualities in their offensive midfield and they have added more to it.

“They are a team that wants to have the ball, make spaces and open things up and put their quality players in situations where they can hurt others and they can."

As always with this fixture, it's going to be utterly absorbing. Hearts gave Rangers a lesson the last time these two met in the Capital, the last match before Robbie Nielson left, and since then under Cathro, the men from Tynecastle have struggled. The hope is these nine new players will make a difference

“We were a short squad, we needed to bring in players, and also players left us," said the Hearts manager. "I think the bigger concern for me would have been had we not done what we have done.

“Had we arrived at tonight and felt short and lacking in options because we need them. Now we are in a position where we can feel more comfortable with the options we have, with the balance that is inside the squad. And now, yeah, we can put that away and come back to football.

"We lacked balance and options across different positions in the team, different profiles of players for different positions in the team. We need to be able to change games, we need to be able to play differently, we need to be able to be flexible.

“Not only do you need numbers to be able to do that, to make changes, but you need guys with slightly different qualities, a slightly different way of doing the same thing.

“That, coupled with every single player needing to be someone with a lot of hunger or fight and be at a point in his life where for whatever reason he’s got to make it work.”