The Interview That Reveals Rodgers Opponent, And Gives The Celtic Boss His Opening.

One of the iconic moments in the fantastic, Academy Award winning movie Patton, comes when the titular general has vanquished his enemy in his first North African battle.

Standing on a high pass overlooking the battlefield, he triumphantly shouts:

“Rommell, you magnificent bastard! I READ YOUR BOOK!”

It’s a piece of Hollywood hokum.

If he read a German general’s book about armoured warfare it would have been Guderian’s Achtung Panzer, and in fact, as he later discovers, Rommell himself wasn’t even present at the battle … but the moment highlights Patton’s genius, his sophistication, his recognition that, as Sun-Tzu says, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”

He definitely studied his opponents. All good generals do.

Rodgers is a good general.

I wrote about the Battle of Pharsalus after he secured us three points at Ibrox with a makeshift team; that’s basically what Ceasar did when faced with Pompey’s larger army; he improvised. It helps that he and Pompey knew each other intimately, and how the other thought.

By that day Rodgers would have known The Mooch’s system inside out, because he’d have watched his sides over and over again.

He would have known the character of the man; we all did, he was clearly arrogant and quite mad.

So, what would he have studied here?

How would Rodgers get to know this man?

Well, for a start you would watch him work.

You would see what his skill-set was, and Rodgers has obviously studied Clement’s tactical approach. How completely he understands it will become clear over the next couple of weeks. The results could be devastating for the Ibrox boss.

But if he wanted to know his man well, he would study other things.

Like what?

His previous record would be educational; whatever went wrong at Monaco went wrong fast, and hard.

So you would want to know what that was, and there are people who Rodgers could reach out to in order to find out.

Beyond that, what?

Well, the fictional Patton had one idea that has proven successful all down the line of history; “I read your book!”

Clement hasn’t written a book. But he has generated plenty of words over the years, and particularly over the course of his time in Glasgow.

What insights might they offer?

Plenty, in fact, and no interview perhaps more than one he gave in October last year, just as he was getting his swagger on, and so still in the honeymoon period where nobody in the media wanted to be the first to burst the bubble. (It took them until the Dundee result to turn.)

A report by Andy Devlin, and published in The Sun, offered a fascinating, and unintentionally hilarious, portrait of the man currently bunkered at Ibrox.

To call him slightly off-centre would be to put it mildly. To be blunt, he comes across like a nut.

“Phillipe Clement admits he divorced his first wife because he was married to football,” the first line of this lunatic piece read. “The new (Ibrox) boss revealed part of why they separated was down to her not sharing his winning mentality.”

Isn’t that … insane? His missus didn’t share his “winning mentality.”

What does that even mean? That she was crap in the women’s darts team?

How do you measure the “winning mentality” of your partner?

I mean, who thinks this way? Who makes a judgement on their significant other based on that? Even if it’s not true, who in God’s name would think there’s some merit in sounding like this? It’s nuts. It’s crazy. How does he think he comes across?

And it gets worse. It gets crazier as it goes on.

“Clement gave a fascinating insight into the turbulent relationship which ended ten years ago, as he compared it with his own coaching philosophy. The 49-year-old firmly believes the drive and hunger to succeed should start in the family home.”

Eah? How many top managers do you think have quizzed their wives on the “winning mentality”?

And how does your home life influence the way your team plays?

How does that help, or hinder, what goes on in a dressing room?

“Not one to settle for second best, the Belgian has since remarried, and is now hoping his recipe for success off the park will translate on it in Glasgow. Clement said: “I don’t set priorities because I am someone who always wants to win.”

Jesus H. Not one to settle for second best.

A “recipe for success off the park” – so divorcing your missus cause she’s not as mental as you is … success now?

So, he just picks his partners based on whether they have a will to win?

Good God.

And how can you reconcile wanting to win with not setting priorities?

No wonder this geezer is full of himself; he’s probably never worked in front of a media which is this sycophantic.

The hacks should have destroyed him over this.

But if you thought that was mad, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

“It’s the way I am. I had a lot of fights with my ex-wife about that. It was because of football. When my children were small and we were playing games, I never let them win because it’s against my nature. You need to deserve to win. You can’t get it like a present — not even small children. If you do, you don’t create the right mentality. She didn’t have the same idea about that.”

What a parent he must have been.

We already know he wasn’t the best husband.

To treat your own kids, even when they were very young, as adversaries, opponents who must be beaten, and to teach them that this is the way life works, that you need to have that competitive edge … to the exclusion of everything else?

What did he do as they grew up? If he saw one of them walk away from a fight, did he administer slaps and punches until the kid hit him back or what?

I mean, these are the sorts of questions which obviously come to you.

“She wanted a normal life, with weekends and more time,” he said of his wife.

The cheek of her, eah?

“She knew that would not be the case and that was when we separated. So, it’s about football but it’s my passion. I have been lucky and later I met someone who understood my story.”

She must be a barrel of laughs, right?

What a life they must have.

The interview delves into other areas of weirdness; he wants full control of the private lives of his players and said they will accept that or he will not have them at the club. And you wonder why he’s been unable to keep any of the soon-to-be out of contract players, right?

Remember his comments earlier in the season about his players having too many babies?

And our media is pretending that this guy is … normal?

It is epically strange. It is ridiculously bonkers.

What comes across over and over and over again is that this guy is full of himself, that he takes himself way too seriously, that he is arrogant and overbearing and that any challenge to that, no matter how small, no matter how modest, can send him over the edge.

It is incredible, and if Rodgers is the leader he seems to be, he will know all of this.

And I think he does, and I think he uses it against Clement.

Patton would. Sun Tzu would. Any general worth his stripes would use this knowledge to send him spinning into a rage which would blind him to everything but striking out hard … and thus the making of momentous mistakes.

I wonder if perhaps Rodgers will leave things where they are … or take one last shot to see what results it gets.

Watch this space. This could be a more interesting week than we thought.