Bad blood will provide warmth and respect as Rodgers and Sahin bury the hatchet in front of the Celtic Champions League stage in Dortmund. — Clerk

Those looking for signs of tension between the managers of Celtic and Borussia Dortmund tonight will be looking in the wrong place.

The lead-up to Celtic’s trip to Sign Iduna Park has been dominated by some old sayings from Nuri Sahin thanking the Almighty for the day he escaped from Brendan Rodgers’ Liverpool.

Tonight, the pair book enemies for the pitch. Although the forecast calls for heavy rain over Dortmund, the managers want to let the water go under the bridge.

German-born Turkish international Sahin has always been a different kind of footballer. The midfielder, who speaks five languages, suffered a serious tendon injury in 2015. Warned by doctors that he might not play again, he began planning his future.

In 2018 he enrolled in the Harvard Business School. He was eager to learn about the lives of less fortunate people in Africa, and joined a campaign to open water wells in Ethiopia.

Sahin struggled to break into the midfield with Steven Gerrard and Jordan Henderson.

Gifted with real intelligence, he did not always use it as well as he should. Surrounded by Jose Mourinho at Real Madrid, 23-year-old Sahin’s youthful confidence convinced him he could win a head-to-head battle with Steven Gerrard.

Taking the microphone from Sinatra was more difficult than I thought. Rodgers moved him to the number 10 spot (Jurgen Klopp described him as a ‘nine and a half’) in a vain attempt to shoehorn his talent into the team.

Shortly after returning to Dortmund in a £7 million deal, Sahin told a Spanish newspaper: “I didn’t fail at Liverpool. Brendan Rodgers wanted me to play as a number 10, but I don’t play behind the forwards. Thank God I’ve left Brendan Rodgers.’

Twelve years have passed since then and Sahin is now the 36-year-old coach of Dortmund. Rodgers is back for his second spell at Celtic and, tonight, the two meet again at the revamped Westfalenstadion, happy to let the dogs sleep.

“Tomorrow we meet again after 12 years and I am looking forward to this duel,” said the Dortmund coach.

“I don’t know what I said when I was young, but the only thing for me was that I played a different position than I was playing.

“The problem was that Steven Gerrard played in my position, so I had to accept my position, and that was the same thing. I really enjoyed everything else during my stay in Liverpool. It’s a fantastic club and, under Brendan’s management, I’ve enjoyed every training session with him.

Rodgers and Sahin in happier times on Merseyside

“He was very focused on the ball, possession and playing in the other area. I can only say good things about it and my stay there.

“The thing is, when you get a call from Dortmund and you’re a Dortmund man, you come home. That was the only reason.

Rodgers understood the reasons behind Sahin’s frustration at Liverpool but welcomes the chance to meet his former player in competitive action. And the Parkhead boss suspects the Dortmund coach knows more about the logic used 12 years ago.

“I never get excited about words,” Rodgers says. “I think all the players and young players want to play. I think at that time, when Nuri was at Liverpool, he had other players who were just ahead of him.

“Unfortunately, at that time, I had moved Steven Gerrard from the number 10 position to a deeper role. I also had Jordan Henderson (both of those guys are among the best captains in Liverpool history) and Nuri was competing against him.

“I tried to bring him into the team and play in some positions that probably didn’t suit him at all. I could have played him as a number 10 when he was a deeper player, but I had other players in those positions who were doing very well.

During his time, he was a good man. He loved football, he trained very well, he was very professional and of course he left Liverpool and came back to Dortmund and I followed his career from there.

Rodgers followed Sahin’s career after he left Liverpool, and now the pair will be reunited.

So, it’s good to see. And now, moving to a management perspective, you know the challenges and will begin to understand them.

“At the moment there are people like (Marcel) Sabitzer who wants to play in the middle and who plays wide for Dortmund. So all those little things come to you as a coach and as a coach.”

Rodgers also signed Borussia Dortmund captain Emre Can for Liverpool and although the departures of Niclas Fullkrug, Mats Hummels and Jadon Sancho may have weakened the Dortmund side that lost to Real Madrid at Wembley in May, they are still in praise. big at home.

Ironically, Giovanni van Bronckhorst’s Rangers secured a decisive 4-2 win at Sign Iduna on their way to the 2022 Europa League final.

Since then, BvB have played 10 home games in Europe against Manchester Metropolis, Chelsea, PSG (twice), AC Milan, Newcastle, Atlético Madrid, PSV Eindhoven, Sevilla and Copenhagen and have not lost any. As such, the scale of the task facing Celtic cannot be overstated.

There is a feeling that victory in home games will be enough to secure a place in the play-off stage.

A 5-1 win over Slovan Bratislava on the opening night left some room for back-to-back trips to Dortmund and Europa League winners Atalanta.

Sahin was quick to insist that any unhappiness between the couple was now a thing of the past.

Beat the Younger Boys and Brugge Membership in Glasgow and progress would be very close. However, any repeat of the five and six goal defeats suffered by Madrid in the last two seasons would take some of the shine off the performance.

In the last two seasons, the Scottish champions have conceded 19 goals in their six Champions League away games.

Their last win was away in the competition against Anderlecht in 2017 and to succeed at this level, Rodgers will need to add a real layer of pragmatism to some very brutal football in recent weeks.

They need to do the dirty things much better.

When asked why he thinks they can do it, Rodgers cited mentality, beliefs and experience, not all of which are good.

“I think we’ve also added some players who will give us something we need in key areas of the pitch,” said the Celtic boss, before adding: “I’ll only know when I see him.”

“On a national level we have done very well, but we want to see what the movement will be like at this stage.”