NO stone has been left unturned in the pursuit of victory in recent days by the men who will step into the dugouts when Rangers take on Celtic at Ibrox and Hearts play Hibernian at Tynecastle tomorrow afternoon.
The opposition have been analysed to the nth degree, a gameplan which maximises their team’s strengths and exploits their rivals’ perceived weaknesses devised and the best starting line-up for the occasion selected.
Michael Beale, Ange Postecoglou, Robbie Neilson and Lee Johnson will all, too, have emphasised to their charges the importance of keeping their cool in their final training sessions in the build-up to the cinch Premiership matches.
They are conscious that one badly-timed challenge, one injudicious remark, one momentary loss of composure, could result in their team being reduced to 10 men or less and render their preparations meaningless.
Will their words of warning, though, be heeded?
The bedlam of derby day has, as we have seen on umpteen occasions over the years, a tendency to cause the red mist to descend in normally unflappable footballers and hell to break loose.
Few more technically gifted players than Lubomir Moravcik have graced Scottish football in modern times.
Yet, the supremely skilful Slovakian playmaker could still, when a game was not going the way he wanted, when the stakes were high, when tempers were flaring, when the atmosphere inside the ground was white hot, be guilty of ill-discipline.
He somehow managed to get himself red carded for squaring up to Rangers striker Michael Mols in the final minute of a League Cup semi-final at Hampden back in 2001 – despite the fact that his side was winning 3-1 at the time and referee Willie Young was about to blow the final whistle.
“I was stupid,” said Moravcik, who was also ordered off for dissent when he was playing for Czechoslovakia in the quarter-final of the World Cup against West Germany in Italy in 1990, earlier this week. “It was a bad reaction.
“If you get sent off for making a poor tackle in a game then that is fair enough. But to get sent off for nothing, for getting involved in an argument or pushing someone, is inexcusable. But it happens sometimes in big games.”
Indeed it does. The early departures of Callum McGregor and Nir Bitton has proved costly for Celtic in games against Rangers in recent seasons. The Ibrox club have suffered after losing Alfredo Morelos and Ross McCrorie in meetings with their Parkhead rivals too.
So what makes an experienced player lose the rag? Why does a normally placid individual suddenly lash out recklessly and land both himself and his team in hot water? What prompts a highly-paid professional to behave like a drunk at closing time on a Friday night? And, perhaps most importantly, can anything be done to prevent it?
Dick Campbell has been involved in Scottish football for over 50 years now as a player, coach and manager and has lost count of the number of occasions an act of petulance has cost his team. He believes that monitoring his players’ moods closely before, during and after games is a crucial part of his job.
“The red mist can descend for any number of reasons,” he said. “Maybe they aren’t playing well, perhaps their team is getting beat. But it could just as easily be that something is making them angry away from football. Sometimes the issue isn’t on the pitch. A really good manager is able to sense his players’ mindset.
“The best way to stop a player getting red carded is to take them off before it happens. If a player gets a booking in the first-half I tend to do that.
“But maybe I have had a right go at them at half-time. You need to do this! You need to do that! Maybe that can get to them. I have seen boys do things in games which are totally out of character. I will think: ‘F***ing hell! How did he get sent off? He’s never tackled anyone in his life!’”
Arbroath manager Campbell knows from bitter personal experience that there is often nothing whatsoever that he can do to maintain order and keep 11 men on the field of play.
“Sometimes something can just flip in the back of a player’s mind,” he said. “Sometimes a player can just go to oblivion.
“Craig Levein is a great friend of mine. He once swung a punch at his own team mate (his fellow Hearts centre half Graeme Hogg in a pre-season friendly against Raith Rovers at Stark’s Park in 1994) and broke his nose. We talk about it regularly.
“Look at Zinedine Zidane in the 2006 World Cup final (the French captain was sent off in extra-time for headbutting Marco Materazzi in the chest after the Italian insulted his sister). The whole world looked at that and thought: ‘What the f*** are you doing?’”
“Zizou” was a notoriously volatile player - that was the 14th occasion he had been red carded in his career. His lamentable disciplinary record underlines that exceptionally gifted individuals sometimes come with some psychological baggage. There is a fine line between madness and genius.
Campbell believes that Lionel Messi’s strong mentality sets him apart from his peers just as much as his extraordinary ability. “He gets some rough treatment, but he can ride all the tackles,” he said. “For me, that is what makes him such a special talent.”
So is a calm demeanour simply something you are born with? Or can a player with a propensity to get embroiled in needless infractions address his failings?
Steven Gerrard, the former Liverpool and England captain and Rangers manager, believes that he recovered from a potentially career-ending injury and produced the most consistent football of his career by working with the renowned English psychiatrist Dr Steve Peters.
In his bestselling personal development book The Chimp Paradox, Dr Peters offers readers tips on how they can both understand and manage their thoughts and emotions using his “Chimp Model”. Gerrard is one of many high-profile sportsmen and women who are devotees of his groundbreaking methods.
Dr Robbie Anderson, a chartered psychologist and founder member of Chimp Management who consults with Dr Peters, assists elite athletes with the mental side of their armoury. He is adamant that footballers can improve their temperament every bit as much as their finishing.
“When you look at how the brain operates, one of the prime survival systems we have got is fight, flight and freeze,” he said. “We have all got that innately built in to us. In sport at times in pressure situations our propensity for those instincts to kick in becomes higher.
“The red mist is probably fight mode. It is a very fast reaction. We aren’t really thinking things through. If somebody comes in with a bad tackle in a game and leaves their foot in too long, the brain, the limbic system in the brain, reacts very quickly.
“Quite often what people will say after they have reacted badly, when they lashed out say, is that they weren’t actually thinking. That is what the brain science shows us – it is not a choice, it is a reaction. It is clearly something the top players have to manage.”
Dr Anderson added: “But there is a lot they can do. There can be things that are already on your plate when you are arriving at a match. So get yourself in the right mindset before you play.
“Everyone can wake up in the morning and feel life’s pressures. You can walk into the office in a bad mood and at risk of a normal everyday occurrence tipping you over the edge. Footballers are no different. They are not immune to that. So the key thing is to arrive at the game in a good mindset.
“The second thing they can do is learn how to deal with situations when they are getting more and more agitated. They can develop some skills for when the red mist starts to come on.
“The key thing that I say to the guys who I work with is to recognise when you are getting a little bit agitated and choose the right behaviours - walk away, have a rest, whatever.
“The All Blacks famously used to spray a bit of water on their faces. It was a mechanism to cool themselves down and remind themselves that getting angry wasn’t going to change the situation.”
Dr Anderson knows that if the Celtic, Hearts, Hibs and Rangers players can keep their heads when all around them are losing theirs it could ultimately prove the difference between triumph and disaster.
“At the top level, the better you get the harder it is to get better,” he said. “Everyone is physically fit nowadays, everyone is eating well. You have goalkeeping coaches, free-kick coaches. Technically, everyone is very good. People see the mental side of the game as a big opportunity.
“If you look at the best players you can see they are good under pressure, good leaders, good decision makers. But I don’t think it is right to say they were mentally strong. They have worked on the mental side of their game and improved on it.
“At the end of the day, you could be the world’s best player, but you are no good if you get a red card and have to go and sit the locker room.”
