Celtic v Rangers: Why Brendan Rodgers needs a result much more than Philippe Clement

With angst simmering away at Celtic Park, new Rangers boss has more credit in the bank

Whenever Celtic and Rangers butt heads, rarely is there equity in the need to prevail.

The second Premiership skirmish of Scotland’s footballing behemoths that rolls around on Saturday lunchtime naturally is being squinted at through the prism of the title race. Ultimately, though, however much the occasion is hyped up, there is no real sense that either of the ancient adversaries have the capacity to strike a telling blow in their scrap for top-flight supremacy when they joust in Glasgow’s east end this weekend. The Ibrox side sitting five points behind their bitterest rivals but having played two games fewer sees to that. These outstanding fixtures create too many imponderables. But that his team’s faltering has led a same-matches-played seven-point lead to evaporate in the space of nine weeks ensures there is much more resting on the outcome of this latest derby for Celtic manager Brendan Rodgers than his Rangers counterpart Philippe Clement.

The pair fronted up to their current roles no doubt looking to soothe bruised egos after they were forcibly removed from their previous posts. The Belgian was bumped by Monaco for a sixth-place Ligue 1 finish in June … only two months after Rodgers was jettisoned by Leicester City as the club sat second bottom of an English Premier League set up from which they were subsequently ejected. And yet, it is Clement – at 49-and-nine-months, only 14 months Rodgers’ junior – who has enjoyed the greater reputational uptick of the two. This hardly does justice to his miraculous mending of an Ibrox team that appeared irreparably broken by the end of the 11-month Michael Beale era a mere three months ago.

Celtic manager Brendan Rodgers already has one win under his belt in the derbies this season.

With a 16-game unbeaten run – the longest by any new Rangers manager since Alex McLeish’s 18 sequence in 2001-02 – and a first available trophy stashed courtesy of League Cup success a fortnight ago – McLeish the last at Ibrox helm to do that too – and a Europa League group topped, Clement has brought up two bells on his footballing fruit machine across his ten-week tenure. He has also made light of an injury hex that has beset his squad. Were his first sampling of the storied fixture to see him secure only a second Rangers win at Celtic Park with a crowd in attendance for 13 years, it would represent hitting the jackpot. But even two out of three would guarantee him remaining in credit going into 2024, whatever unfolds against Rodgers’ men. This is an opponent that, regardless of their recent travails with back-to-back defeats this month in being undone by Kilmarnock and Hearts, stand as the most formidable Clement will have faced since arriving in the country.

Rodgers better hope that is so since his Celtic bank account appears largely empty. The Northern Irishman’s assignment seemed superficially straightforward when he returned for a second stint at the club in June. After all, before the lure of Tottenham Hotspur proved understandably irresistible, his beloved predecessor Ange Postecoglou had bequeathed him a treble-winning squad. But under the surface there were issues with the potential to bubble up. Rodgers’ departure with two-thirds of his 2018-19 third season completed, as the Celtic support became obsessive over his bagging a triple treble – which he has acknowledged will never be forgiven by some fans – meant he had a sceptical audience to win over. Moreover, Celtic’s clean sweep last season masked that the edge had begun to come off their play across the closing three months of that campaign.

Rodgers – in addition to coming up short in properly replacing Jota, Carl Starfelt and Aaron Mooy – has suffered the fall-out from that. Dropping ten points across a stretch of the season wherein Clement’s team have given up only two has created the impression that he isn’t in his pomp, as was the case as in becoming the only manager in the history of the Scottish game to gobble up seven straight domestic honours. It is a perception lent weight by this season suffering dunts that he never did across his original two-and-three-quarter year stint. One came almost immediately, with a first cup-tie loss that came at the club’s entry point to the League Cup away to Kilmarnock in August giving way to Rodgers becoming the first man at the Celtic helm to lose consecutive league games in a decade. Hysteria ensued among the faithful as that latter low point came a fortnight ago, and the fact it now appears permanently at the molten level among some Celtic followers makes victory over Rangers this weekend imperative to earn him some cooling air. Not least because Rodgers now has the misfortune of finding himself a Neil Lennon status manager. That is, one whose very presence engenders simmering resentment for sections of the fanbase who will accept him just so long as nothing – anything – threatens to go awry.

The 50-year-old could draw succour from the fact that in this current Celtic stint, his most celebrated moment came with his masterminding of a derby victory at Ibrox in September when a home win was considered an absolute stick on. It means that whatever might be said of Rodgers Mk II, his touch in these gladiatorial contests wherein he has lost only one of 14, could not be said to have deserted him. He simply cannot afford for that to happen now. Not when Clement, who projects the assurance – to his players and in public forums – of a three-times title winner gearing up for a fourth, is a top-level operator of the sort he has never faced in the derby arena within these borders. Not when it is 11 years since Celtic last lost two home league games before Hogmanay had heaved into sight. Rodgers will know he simply has to avoid a different sort of bell tolling this weekend, and prevent three of these forming an inconceivable winning line for his Rangers counterpart.