At first glance, Christian Nade doesn’t exactly look like the type of man that you would want to antagonise.

The hulking Hamilton striker, who spends more time these days working on his core than his corpulence, was also known to possess quite the hair-trigger temper in the formative years of his playing career.

Now though, he has engaged his brains to counteract his brawn, and his new relaxed, yet hard-working approach to football and life means that not even Hamilton’s patter-merchants taking aim at his French accent can provoke a response.

He said: “They like to try to imitate my French accent, they know that it makes me really mad!

“It’s really, really bad. Usually it’s Carlton (Morris) and Jamie (Sendles-White), they don’t stop. I’ll just say ‘Hi’ and they’ll say ‘Christian, Christian’ to me in a really bad French accent just to drive me crazy. I’m always on the edge with them.

“I say to them that they’re lucky I’m 31 now and not 25, because I would have knocked them out by now!

“I just laugh now and brush it off. It didn’t take too much to wind me up though back then!

“They’re always doing stuff like that. Today for example, I was just in time, and they were saying they were going to fine me and had me panicking, but I checked with the coach and I was in on time.

“The mood is always the same here. When we lost the game against St Johnstone it was still a good atmosphere.”

The defeat Nade refers to was the one major disappointment for Hamilton in an otherwise impressive start to the season.

With St Johnstone next up at home, Nade has designs on avenging that 4-1 reverse, and he hopes that even if he doesn’t get on the scoresheet, he can help open up space again for red-hot teammate Dougie Imrie.

He laughed: “He’s doing very well, but only because of the movement of the strikers, we’re creating the space for him!

“Yesterday he tried to give me a bit of stick, saying that on Saturday it was the first time that I ran this season and that’s what made the space for him.

“As a striker, you want to score as many goals as you can, and you can be a bit upset when the winger is scoring more goals than you, but it’s still early in the season so we can catch him up.

“To be honest, we all just want to do well for the team. It doesn’t matter who scores, the most important thing is the team and to get points at the end of the game.

“He’s only ever scored five in a season so he’ll soon stop anyway, it’s no problem!

“I’m also still the top scorer in the League Cup with one, we got put out so no one can beat me!”

Nade says that rookie boss Martin Canning is among the best he has worked with during his career, and he gives him major credit for Hamilton’s continuing success.

“He’s really, really good,” he said.

“I’ve worked with a lot of managers and he’s one of the only ones who comes in and talks individually to the players. Csaba Laszlo did that as well.

“He will talk to the players, tell them how they are doing privately and tell you when you’re doing well.

“He makes you feel confident and he can also spot when a player is feeling a little bit low. He’ll take the time to talk to you and can cheer you up in about five seconds.

“It makes you want to go out on to the pitch and fight for him.”