Rodgers locks horns with his mentor

– In Celtic’s Champions League clash with Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City tonight, Brendan Rodgers (left) will pit his wits against a man who has had a defining influence on his career.

Whether with Swansea City, Liverpool or Celtic, Rodgers has sought to emulate the kind of passing football with which Guardiola took first Barcelona and then Bayern Munich to the summits of the game.

“I’ve admired him from the outside looking in, at the courage he has showed to play the modern game,” Rodgers told Spanish sports newspaper AS in 2014.

“He has love and passion for football, great principles and ideas and there’s the confidence he gives to people.”

Jose Mourinho gave Rodgers his first big leg-up in professional football, inviting the Northern Irishman, then working in the academy at Reading, to join him at Chelsea in 2004.

But it is Guardiola, Mourinho’s nemesis, whose example Rodgers has always striven to follow and it was in Spain that his ideas about how to play the game took shape.

Rodgers, 43, is an exponent of the joined-up coaching philosophy practised by clubs like Barcelona, where youth players are taught to play in the same possession-focused way as the first team.

He now has another chance to prove the years of Spanish homework were not in vain. – AFP