THE TRAMPOLINE EFFECT My Bhoys bounced back from pain of Dortmund but we're ready to suffer again at this highest of levels, admits Rodgers

Rafa Nadal finally brought two decades at the summit of professional tennis to an end last week.

Amid the tears and the tributes it was easy to overlook the fact that the 14-time French Open champion spent much of his career in agony. He wrestled with a chronic foot condition call Mueller-Weiss syndrome for years and spent most of 2023 nursing a hip injury.

The pain and the torment were the price to be paid for winning 22 Grand Slam titles. A masochistic streak ran through everything when he admitted: ‘I learned during all my career to enjoy suffering.’

Celtic have done their share of suffering in the Champions League. And enjoyable isn’t the first word which springs to mind.

When Scotland’s champions were thrashed 7-1 in Dortmund, they were savaged. Winning four points from six in the two games since, Rodgers can afford to be philosophical over the experience now, comparing it to a bounce on a trampoline.

‘Failure is a part of the journey,’ states the Northern Irishman

‘And I said it at the time, and I was probably looked at a bit funny, but it can be that trampoline effect and it can bounce you back even higher. But it’s how you deal with it which is important.

‘So dealing with the setback that we had that night, you can see where it’s trampolined the players and bounced them forward. It’s all in how you react to the difficult moments. This team have shown that and proven that – and I believe there’s still a lot more to come.’

In the euphoria following the 3-1 win over RB Leipzig earlier this month – Celtic’s biggest European win in years – it was easy to forget how edgy it had all become when the Bundesliga side claimed the lead with a cheap opening goal.

They should have scored from another effort moments later. Antonio Nusa then slashed a glorious chance high and wide as Celtic rode their luck. When Nicolas Kuhn equalised with their first shot on target, the hosts never looked back.

After a decade without a victory against Europe’s elite at Parkhead, the team have now claimed three on the bounce. For the first time in years, Celtic are now expected to win a home game in Europe.

The expectation ignores the fact that Club Brugge beat Sturm Graz away, Aston Villa at home and were unfortunate to lose 3-1 to AC Milan in the San Siro. Like the Leipzig game, Celtic won’t have this game tonight all their own way. They’ll have to suffer at times, no question.

‘As much as you want to dominate, you’re just not going to do it,’ said Rodgers. ‘You can’t do it at this level.

‘You’re going to have spells where the opposition, who have real quality in their team and are very well coached, will make you suffer. And it’s having that ability to suffer.

‘I think that was the great thing with the Leipzig game. We suffered, we went behind after making a really good start. So we had to weather a wee bit of a storm for 10 minutes or so, but then we grew back into the game again and ran out very, very convincing winners. But you have to be ready for it and that’s something that we’re developing all the time.’

If any club have cracked this Champions League lark, it’s Real Madrid. In the biggest overhaul to the competition format in 32 years, however, even the 15-time winners are being asked to suffer like Rafa.

Like Bayern Munich and Paris Saint-Germain – the club bankrolled by the state of Qatar – Carlo Ancelotti’s team are finding the new single league unsettling. There’s the expectation that they’ll pull through in the end, because these teams usually do. That’s one of the reasons why Rodgers is reluctant to take anything for granted yet.

With seven points from four games and four more matches to come – against Brugge, Dinamo Zagreb, Young Boys and Aston Villa – a kind draw offers a real chance to reach the last-16 play-offs at least.

Little over a month since his managerial record in the Champions League was being battered from pillar to post, Rodgers won’t make the mistake of thinking he’s cracked it just yet.

‘You’ve always got to be on, you’re always learning,’ he said. ‘Things can be tricky. Never think you’ve ever got it sussed.

‘Especially, with the greatest respect, clubs like ourselves.

‘It’s always the case that we have to bring our ability at the highest level into every game if we’re going to have that opportunity to progress. It’s a brutal competition in terms of the level and the slightest mistakes get punished.

‘In the Leipzig game, we started the game really well and then we gave the ball away – once. It leads to a corner, you concede and then all of a sudden you’re on the back foot for 10 minutes.

‘But we all know that, I think we’ve all seen it enough. You have to be laser focused in your concentration, you’re bringing your performance level and then, like I said, you have to make it really difficult for the opponent.

‘We’re playing against a very, very good opposition and we’ll be ready to try and control as much of that as we can.’

‘Our objective is to get into the play-off phase first and foremost and then we just have to see what points total (we can get). But. for us, it really is focusing on this game and bringing the performance level.’

When the going gets tough – and it usually does at some stage – Rodgers preaches the need for calm. 

That’s an easy thing to ask for and a good deal harder to deliver when 60,000 fans are functioning at their wits’ end. 

Atalanta away and Leipzig at home showed promising signs of a team learning to keep their head when everyone around them is losing theirs.

‘When you can go away to Atalanta and keep a clean sheet, that gave us great confidence that -at the very highest level – we can be strong defensively. Then we took that into the RB Leipzig game,’ said Rodgers.

‘Same idea, but then we’ve got the home crowd behind us as well. So the level of our football then gets elevated and overall we produced a really consistent performance. ‘Along with some of the other performances we’ve had over the journey in the last 14 months, that has given us a real good hope that we can keep progressing and developing in this competition.

‘We want to make it really, really difficult for teams to play against us – and we know that we’re going to have to suffer at times. But that’s the level.’