Henrik Larsson will play for Celtic in today's Scottish Cup Final against Rangers in front of a 52,000 crowd and he is well entitled to take the view that the game is the easy part of the weekend. Facing a few hundred people in a smoke-filled hotel suite tomorrow night could be considerably harder work.

There he will pick up his award as the Scottish Footballer of the Year and, as is the custom on these occasions, the audience is likely to be spread betting on the length of his acceptance speech. No-one will be buying on the high side.

The 28-year-old Swede is sure to take the low-key approach. He guards his words with care at the best of times. What you know about Larsson is precisely what he cares to tell you and nothing more: "I wouldn't say that Henrik is the life and soul of the party but he's got a sly sense of humour," says one of his Scottish teammates." How does it come out? "I can't think of anything, really." What he does is score goals. There have been 38 of them so far this season and even if some Scottish defenders have the same kind of turning circle as a supertanker, the statistic is impressive enough. England, and Kevin Keegan, will be regarding him as a serious player when they meet Sweden in the European Championships.

Others speak more more passionately about him. Dr Jozef Venglos, the wise old cove who had been just about everywhere before becoming Celtic manager, struggles far harder than Larsson to get his tongue round the farther reaches of the English language but he still enthuses about the man.

"You have to put him alongside men like Salas, Batistuta and Bierhoff as a major goalscorer in Europe," Venglos says. "He is so very calm with his first touch of the ball but what is important in the British game is that he has strong feet and a hard body. "He's able to take hard tackles and he has a big intellectual capacity for the game which the best players all possess. He knows exactly what he is trying to do. Maybe that's the most important thing of all about him."

The man himself is far less conventional than he seems. His father was a sailor from Cape Verde in the Virgin Isles who married a Swede and lived in Helsinborg. He started playing at the age of six, but it was only when he moved to Feyenoord that he became a full-time professional footballer in his twenties.

As a 19-year-old he helped Helsinborg into the Swedish Premier League but it was hardly the big time. "I was getting about £500 a month from the football and took up this job helping out at a school. Looking after the physical education a bit, generally just doing what was useful. That brought me up to about £800 a month, which was decent money for someone still living with his parents." He had also met Magdalena, then his girlfriend, now his wife whose privacy he guards so fiercely.

She went with him to Amsterdam but Feyenoord was not the life-enhancing experience he had sought. "It was my first time out of Sweden for a long period but, along with Magdalena I coped."

The problem was that he did not quite fit in with Feyenoord's tactics. "They played three up and they were always choosing me in one of those three different positions and it was regimented," says Larsson.

"I preferred to move around a lot. It's not hard to understand why I didn't like it very much." Scotland has turned out to be a haven rather than a backwater to the extent that he is also Sweden's Sportsman of the Year. Larsson relishes the pace and the fury of the Scottish game - the qualities which so often camouflage the technical deficiencies of a country that still thinks football is played with jackets as goalposts and that the object of the game is to get stuck in.

"Here the scenery is wonderful and I value the environment in which I live. Best of all, the game is much faster," confirms Larsson.

Larsson can be contrasted with Rangers' Gabriel Amato, an Argentinian bought from Real Madrid whose skills might even outrank those of the Swede. But he can also look like the innocent pedestrian caught in the middle of the road while the traffic whizzes around him. No-one ever became Scottish Footballer of the Year without first proving above all else that his heart was in the right place.

Today, Larsson tries to give Celtic a prize at the end of a difficult and disappointing season. If he does so, he will be the polite and staid one during the lap of honour. The rest will head for the beaches on the Med but he has one last match to play against England. "Then I think of holidays".

Rangers, who are hoping to land the treble after already clinching the Premier League title and League Cup, may yet be able to utilise the services of Colin Hendry and Neil McCann, who have been struggling with groin and knee injuries respectively. Celtic have yet to win a trophy under Venglos and for a club of their standing and ambition a blank season is unacceptable.

Their main concern surrounds striker Mark Viduka, who has an ankle injury. Celtic physio Brian Scott admitted last night: "It doesn't look as though he will make it."

And Vidar Riseth is definitely out of tomorrow's Tennents Scottish Cup final against Rangers because of an injury to Manchester United's European Cup hero Ole Gunnar Solskjaer.

He will probably watch the game on TV as he is needed for Norway's Euro 2000 qualifier against Georgia on Sunday.