Him to go on his Ibrox touchline run
keeping an emotional and intellectual distance from the madness around him.
“You have got to make sure you don’t trap yourself, as well as the players, in to the pressure,” he said.
“It is always there. You can’t try to hide f rom it by pretending it is not there. Because, make no mistake about it, it is there.
“Yo u carry the responsibility for millions of supporters, your players, your club, your board. It is there. It is not going away.
“What you have to do is re- direct the flow of all the background noise that goes around it and filter it, in order for you to concentrate on your job, so that when you are under pressure in your job, you think clearly, not emotionally.
“That comes with experience. It comes with being in the situation and dealing with it.
“I have experienced it nine times now, but I have always tried to stay calm within it all and not let the mind wander too much. At the end of the day, you have to try to control everything.
“From the c o a c h ’s perspective and manager’s perspective, it is a different focus than what it is if you are travelling to watch the game on the coach.
“That is a totally different thing altogether.
“But yes, of course, you are excited. And, of course, it was the same going back to my very first Celtic v Rangers game, when I first came in.”
While accepting the general point that he is bound to end up on the losing side of the derby sometime, because everyone loses sometimes, Rodgers feels no reason to believe it will be this afternoon.
“It’s hard to win them all, but we have shown we can win in different ways,” he said.
“Graeme Murty said after the last game that they may not have a better chance to beat us.
“We respect them, respect the game. But really our focus is on our own game.
“In these big games we have, in the main played well, and showed resilience and quality.”