SOCCER: Goalie's amazing phone call came out of blue

Hamish Bidwell You're a professional footballer, seemingly at the peak of your powers and your own English Premiership club doesn't want to know you. You're so far down the pecking order that you've started spending your weekends playing cricket rather than soccer, when all of a sudden the phone rings.
Who's it going to be? Doncaster? Yeovil? Leyton Orient maybe?
At the time the answer seemed so far-fetched that neither Jonathon Gould nor his then Bradford City manager Chris Kamara could believe it.
"It was amazing," said Gould earlier this week. "I was actually in the third team at the time and I was playing cricket for the chairman of Bradford City's cricket team and he was basically playing me to play cricket instead of football, I think. And I just got this phone call out of the blue to say Celtic wanted a goalkeeper and that I had to sign by five o'clock in time for the European deadline.
"I went to see the manager and he'd already told me I could go for nothing and I told him there was a bit of a rush. Then I told him I was going to Celtic and he was quite shocked by that. I made my debut for Celtic against Roma, the Italian side, and then I played the next 48 games that season."
Like many people who've walked the walk, Gould feels little need to talk it, so a few bald facts are required to put his career into context. He played in the 350 times in the Football League, including stints in the Premiership with Coventry and Bradford, before making 160 appearances for Celtic, which included three Scottish Championships, three League Cups and one Scottish FA Cup on top of a brief international career that included keeping for Scotland against Brazil at the 1998 World Cup.
Not bad for a part-time cricketer.
It all happened so fast that it wasn't until the end of that debut season that Gould finally understood what a massive turn his life had taken.
"I didn't think about it much that first year, you just get on with it and do your job," he said.
"In that first season we stopped Rangers from winning the league 10 years in a row, so it was a massive year for Celtic. I don't think I realised what it was all about until it was halftime in the last game of the season and we were 1-0 up against St Johnstone and a win meant we won the championship.
"I know for a fact that we were waiting for the helicopter and if you heard the helicopter, that meant that the league trophy was on it. We went up 2-0 and within 10 minutes the helicopter was above the ground ready to drop off the championship trophy and it was at halftime in that match that I put a towel over my head and thought 'don't make a mistake now'."
For a player who admits to having been a total nobody when he arrived in Glasgow it was one terrific debut season and in any other year Gould would have been feted everywhere he went. But football being what it is, the headlines and accolades went to the player who'd started that season with him - Henrik Larsson.
In 322 career games for Celtic, Larsson scored an incredible 242 goals, to cement his place among the greats of Scottish football and usher in an era of amazing success for the club where individual glory was simply a by-product of the win at all costs team culture.
"The thing about Celtic was that we had such a strong dressing room," Gould said.
"We had seven or eight players and I wouldn't say we bullied the dressing room, but we ruled it, and if anyone came into the team and played a couple of games and got cocky, they were shot down very quickly. We had guys like Henrik Larsson, Chris Sutton, John Hartson, Marc Rieper, all real big men and big characters.
"There was a little bloke called Eyal Berkovic, who was great going forward, but terrible going back. I had massive arguments with him to the point where I had to go round his house and apologise, but that was because I wanted to win and I didn't think he was pulling his finger out.
"It would've been all right if he was scoring 25 goals a season, but you had Henrik getting 50 and every time his contract would come up the boys would say 'give him what he wants' because he used to work as hard as anyone in the team when he didn't have the ball and when he had it."
After starting under Wim Jansen, the enigmatic Martin O'Neill took over the reigns at Celtic. Famed for his intensity, Gould says O'Neill, long tipped to take over from Sir Alex Ferguson at Manchester United, was a very difficult man to know.
"The one thing I learnt very quickly with Martin O'Neill was that you did not answer him back, even if you knew he was wrong," he said.
"I had Wim in my first year and he was the quietest guy you'd ever met. Not once in 48 games that season did he say, 'I think you should have done that', he just let me get on with it, which is pretty rare because a lot of managers tend to be goalkeeper-bashers.
"Martin used to come into the dressing room before the game and he'd probably say 20 words, but they'd always have some impact. But he could also go off at people incredibly. "He's a very, very intelligent guy. He's practiced law and I think he'd watched Brian Clough and it was almost as if he'd created a persona to manage a football club, because you'd see him in front of 2000 people at a convention and he'd be the funniest, wittiest guy you'd ever met. But put him in a football club and it was like a black cloud was following him.
"He wouldn't get close to you, but he'd tell you the truth, but you wouldn't get that familiarity because he believed it bred contempt and I believe that myself as well."
After a lengthy spell in which he wasn't playing, Gould made the difficult decision to sign with English first division club Preston North End. He says he could've stayed on at Celtic and earned tidy money as a back-up, but the lure of playing was too strong.
From there, he enjoyed a brief spell at Bristol City before his wife said it was about time he fulfilled his ambition to come back to New Zealand. For some ex-pros, that might be a morale-crushing prospect, but in Gould's case, he says his best years in the game are still to come.