In less than two weeks’ time they’ll come together on the south side of Glasgow.
But, although Brendan Rodgers and Philippe Clement will share the same postcode for an afternoon on the touchline at Hampden Park, these two managers are now co-existing in two completely different worlds. If such a thing is even possible. And for the time being at least.
On Saturday, Rodgers saw his long term vision for Celtic being realised and coming together in front of his eyes. Having spent so much of his first season back in town banging on about the need for his squad to be reinforced with ‘quality’ additions, he must have felt as if this first half disemboweling of Ross County was a moment of vindication.
It’s what he had in his mind’s eye from the start. The manpower required to fight on two fronts, in the Champions League and in the domestic game, without skipping a beat.
Better still, to be able to make wholesale changes to his starting XI and to find that these tweaks and alterations might actually improve the energy and intensity of his side’s performance rather than heighten the risk of a drop off. Rodgers swapped out a total of six players from the team he selected to face Bruges on Wednesday night and four of these so called second stringers – Liam Scales, Luke McCowan, Paulo Bernardo and Adam Idah – had got themselves on the scoresheet before County had made it inside to the sanctuary of the dressing room at the interval.
This was wrecking ball stuff from the champions and rock solid proof Rodgers is a manager in complete and utter control, not only of his own team and its destiny but also of the direction his football club is moving in.
His plan for Celtic is now crystalising and his reputation is being re-established and re-enhanced accordingly. There’s now mounting evidence to suspect that Rodgers 2.0 might end up being a considerable upgrade on his first stint in charge, when the consistent rattling off of trebles became entirely routine and almost matter of fact.
He’s now engaged in playing managerial chess, with the calmness and authority to think five moves into the future. Meanwhile, across the city, Clement continues to fly by the seat of his pants, cobbling his Rangers side together on a game-by-game basis without any indication that he really knows what the outcome of his decisions might be.
The Belgian might have scrambled his way to three points in Perth yesterday afternoon thanks to an own goal from Jason Holt but, one year into the job, there is still no identifiable style or substance to the manager’s work.
And nothing to suggest he actually knows what it is that he is actually trying to achieve, other than survive in the job from one week to the next. It has felt as if Clement has been banking on the incompetence of the men up the stairs to blind them from what has been glaringly obvious to everyone else for quite some considerable time.
While Rodgers has it all methodically and meticulously worked out at Celtic, Clement is throwing muck at the wall in the hope of seeing what sticks. He doesn’t know if he can trust his captain enough to play him. Can’t work out who should partner John Souttar at the back. Chops and changes the shape and balance of his midfield three like he’s pinning a tail on a donkey.
And has absolutely no idea who should be leading his attack as a reliable, fully functioning centre forward. Amidst this muddled uncertainty, the likes of Nico Raskin and Ianis Hagi have emerged from nowhere to walk into his first team – even though both of these players looked to be on the way out just a few months ago.
Clement even went to the trouble of embarrassing Hagi in public by saying that the Romanian should find a new club during the summer window as he simply wasn’t talented enough to cut it as a Rangers No.10.
And yet there he was yesterday at McDiarmid Park, as the most likely creative spark in Clement’s team and the man whose assist got the manager back down the road again without suffering any fresh collateral damage.
And yet the feeling remains that Clement is now in nothing more than a holding pattern ahead of that showdown with Rodgers in less than a fortnight’s time. If timing is everything in this game then incoming Rangers CEO Parick Stewart has certainly picked his moment to arrive on the scene.
The former Manchester United man, who carries with him a very serious reputation, will start work 24 hours after the Premier Sports Cup Final has been won and lost, and while the dust kicked up at the national stadium is still settling.
But he’ll already be keeping an eye fixed on the manager and his team from a distance and forming his own conclusions over what is required in order to get his own Ibrox tenure off to a solid start.
Stewart has been around the block at Old Trafford enough to know what it looks like when a manager is struggling to keep his head above water. They’ve had enough of them over the last decade or so. And he’ll know too the dangers involved by choosing to do nothing more than hope for the best against all the odds.
That’s precisely what Rangers have been doing since the start of the season, crossing their fingers that Clement might still turn a listing ship around. As a result of their inactivity and of the work that Rodgers has been busy putting together in Glasgow’s east end, the outcome of a cup final between these two sides has never felt so inevitable.
So much so that a Rangers win on December 15 might be considered as a borderline freakish result. And that itself tells the story of where Rodgers and Clement are living right now. In the same city for the time being but in very different worlds.