Manager Brendan Rodgers, who will be experiencing his first Old Firm fixture, is relaxed about the expectations on his side, who are overwhelming favourites to win the first league fixture between the two clubs in four years. That goal in 1979, another typical long-range effort in the 1982 League Cup Final and a late equaliser in a famous 4-4 at Ibrox which gained a vital point in helping Celtic to a last-day league title triumph in 1986.
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Celtic coach Brendan Rodgers said he is expecting the match to be fiercely contested in front of 60,000 passionate fans at Celtic Park.
Warburton insisted he sees the match as like any other although he does not take the significance of the Old Firm derby lightly, while his team will take confidence from that cup victory. I read four minimum, one very wise pundit said.
“It’s an emotive game and there is passion, you want that. It’s a tough place to go but we are absolutely relishing this encounter”. “We have just not put it together as much this season as last season”. We know we have the game to hurt anybody.
“I don’t think anything will prepare you from watching on the television to actually being there”, Rodgers said.
“We welcomed back Jason Holt into full training on Thursday morning, Josh Windass played an hour last week and Martyn Waghorn half an hour and trained well all week so we are now getting close to a full squad.”
“It’s another game but it’s a special game”, Rodgers said.
The former Manchester City and Chelsea man will get his first taste of Old Firm action this Saturday where he will be looking to make life hard for Rangers right-back James Tavernier and keep his goal-a-game ratio intact. But if you look at our first four games if you include this one, they were all going to be against rivals to us for the league. This season it’s just taken us a little bit longer than it did last season. This notion of “look how obsessed they are with us” has crept into the feud and it is wholly unbecoming of everyone involved. We’ll be going to Parkhead and looking to dominate the ball, create chances and score goals.
“We are disappointed we have maybe not performed as well, but we are still going into it with belief in what we are doing”.
“Whoever we play at home, our objective is to win. But if we can do that then we are more than confident we can get the right result”.
“This time, we have come up through the lower leagues, they are the champions and the best team in the country obviously, they are champions for a reason”.
The back-and-forth between Joey Barton and Scott Brown was brought up as well as questions about the former Man City midfielder’s temperament and Miller revealed: “It’s trying to find that balance between a cool-head and being aggressive”.
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“Yeah, we have started slowly, a lot slower than we would have liked”. They are looking forward to this game, they are relishing this game. In our squad we’ve got players who might not all have that level of pace but definitely have the ability to hurt Celtic.
