Holt hails Neilson for ensuring his Hearts divorce wasn’t messy
IN LIFE, honesty may traditionally be the best policy but football’s underbelly rarely throws up an over- abundance of i ndividuals blessed with a strong moral compass.
Mercifully, however, not everyone feels compelled to deal in self-serving half truths, downright l i es and doublespeak around the clock.
Jason Holt might well have been a useful accessory for Robbie Neilson to take off the Tynecastle shelf and dust down from time to time this season.
Had the Hearts manager been pig- headed, his club could have pocketed a juicy development fee higher than the £65,000 they agreed with Rangers if they had been willing to drag the matter to a tribunal.
Neilson, though, clearly believes that there is more to this game than squeezing every last penny out of every situation. To his mind, matters such as the continual development of an emerging talent should always take precedence.
‘We offered Jason a new contract and he turned it down,’ explained Neilson. ‘He hadn’t signed for anyone, so what do we do? Leave him in limbo? We can’t do that, we have a responsibility to let a young player go and play football.
‘Yes, we could have said let’s go to tribunal and the boy could sit there without a club for a year or two years. He is a good kid and worked hard when he was a Hearts player and we needed to be reasonable.
‘We definitely have a responsibility. He’s got to play football and we accepted an offer which we believed was fair.’
Neilson’s bluntness in stating last season that Holt would struggle to get regular first-team football under him at Hearts was the prime motivation for him rejecting the deal.
It is also the reason the 22-year-old holds no grudges against the club with which he had a 13-year association.
‘As a player, when you speak to your manager, you just want an honest answer and Robbie was great with that, he gave me honest answers,’ said Holt. ‘It helped me. I knew what the plans were, so that was it.
‘It is part and parcel of football. Players come and go all the time. My situation was no different.’
It cannot have been easy, though. No matter how expected it is, confirmation that the only club you have known deems you surplus to requirements is a tough one to swallow.
‘If you let your head go down, then you’re not helping yourself at all,’ recalled Holt. ‘I think the only thing for it is to keep the head up, keep feeling positive and looking ahead to the future. That’s what I did. I came in here and signed here, so I’m really happy.’
Holt is clearly not a player who believes in taking the easy option. In rejecting the chance to sign an extension at Hearts, he not only ran the risk of being frozen out of the game by the Gorgie club, he had — at that juncture — no Plan B.
Yet by trusting his ability and shining after being invited to train last week with Rangers, his reward for taking that risk is now a three-year deal.
‘I was asked to come in and train. Obviously, it was down to me to try to impress and I did enough to get the deal done,’ he added. ‘ I’m delighted. First and foremost, I wanted to come here. It’s worked out well.’
Having played as a trialist against Burnley on Tuesday, Holt is in the frame for a starting berth as a fully-fledged Rangers player at Easter Road tomorrow.
As a ball-playing central-midfielder, he feels the portents of Warburton’s reign have been positive from the minute he walked through the door.
‘As soon as I came in, I got a real sense of excitement and anticipation about the coming season,’ he said. ‘All the boys were really positive and I could sense that there’s hope, it’s going to be something good.
‘I think in the game we have played so far we’ve shown we’ve gelled quite well already. The training has been great with a high intensity. I think there is a real togetherness with the boys and we’ve gelled really well already.
‘The style of play he is looking to implement has impressed me. It is the right way forward. I think it excites all the players.’
Holt spent the latter part of last season on loan at Sheffield United but the 15 league games he managed for Hearts prior to leaving mean he is now seeking his second-successive medal in the Scottish Championship.
‘It is good to get one and my aim for this season is to get another one,’ he explained.
Hearts are, of course, now out of Rangers’ immediate line of sight. Which is not to say that Holt will not be driven by a desire to prove to everyone at Tynecastle — and beyond — that he has much to offer on this stage.
‘I appreciated their honesty,’ he added. ‘But I think in football you’re always looking to prove everyone wrong. There are always people out there watching you and you just have to do your best.’