Michael Beale carrying weighty Rangers burden but Celtic expectancy sees Brendan Rodgers lumbered by same issue - Hugh Keevins

Brendan Rodgers is stuck with the need to preserve managerial infallibility at Celtic Park. Michael Beale is burdened by the need to stop being all talk and no trophies at Ibrox.

The old cliche is that pressure is a privilege. The new reality is pressure is suffocating and success is necessary to avoid asphyxiation. That’s why today begins the Old Firm’s variation on being caught between a rock and a hard place. Celtic need to negotiate the worst playing surface in the country when they go to Kilmarnock in the Viaplay Cup this afternoon.

But there will be no mitigating factor for Rodgers in the eyes of Celtic fans if one-third of last season’s Treble is removed from the trophy cabinet by Killie, aided and abetted by their synthetic pitch. Rangers’ fragile progress in domestic and European football, complete with misfiring strikers and a crowd impatient with certain aspects of their newly-recruited Foreign Legion, will corner the surreal end of the market.

A midweek Champions League play-off against PSV Eindhoven at a sold-out and noisily-hyperactive Ibrox will be followed by a trip to Dingwall for a Saturday lunchtime kick-off against Ross County. You could fit all of Dingwall’s population – 5491 people at the last count – into the Sandy Jardine Stand and have plenty of room to spare. What the imports will make of Scottish football’s version of Brigadoon is anybody’s guess.

Yet they can’t afford disorientation as the loss of any points in the game immediately before the first Old Firm derby of the season will be regarded as unacceptable by the jury still out on the look of Beale’s multi-national, multi-million-pound creation. So the tightrope walk for Rodgers and Beale begins today.

Each manager has, for one reason or