FORTY-EIGHT hours was enough time for Eddie Murphy’s character in the eponymous movie and it will be long enough for Pedro Caixinha, too. While most of the rest of the city starts to salivate over the first Old Firm/Glasgow derby (delete according to personal preference) several weeks in advance, the Rangers manager won’t turn his attention to facing Celtic until two days before Saturday’s game.

That, the Portuguese believes, will be long enough to formulate a plan to stop Brendan Rodgers’ side in their tracks. Perhaps privately Caixinha has been doing his homework on the Scottish champions but, in public at least, he is embracing the old cliché about taking things one game at a time.

His focus, then, is solely on Tuesday night’s return to Firhill on Betfred Cup duty, after which he will give his players a day off before training recommences on Thursday. Only then will he and his squad start to look ahead to what will be the toughest test of this new-look Rangers side to date.

Caixinha rarely looks like a man feeling under any great pressure – he has an Ivan Golac-style “stop and smell the flowers” outlook on life – and the thought of taking down Celtic evidently isn’t giving him any sleepless nights.

“I cannot stop the noise but I can avoid it getting on my mind,” he says of the fanfare that surrounds this fixture. “I just focus on the games and the process. I don’t care about the circus that surrounds the game. You need to know how to manage it.”

“What is important is that we prepare all the games to win. And that one is the same. I will have just two days to prepare.

“We play on Tuesday and then we will be off on Wednesday. That’s the plan. I’m not going to change anything in my plan, my vision, and my way of seeing things. The boys who are playing on Tuesday will need two days to recover, so until I arrive there, I need to collect a lot of information. I’ll have time to think about it.”

Caixinha chose not to watch Celtic’s Champions League opener against Paris Saint-Germain – either in flesh or on television – believing it would not have told him anything about how Rodgers’ side will line up at Ibrox on Saturday. Instead he watched his Portuguese compatriots.

“Celtic will not play the same way they did against PSG,” he said. “I’m going to watch it next week. I wanted to enjoy a game without working and to see how the Portuguese teams are doing. The Benfica game was important as we are going to play them on October 6.”

Similarly, he has not so far trawled through his previous two experiences of the derby last year, when Celtic knocked his team out of the William Hill Scottish Cup in the semi-finals then handed them a humiliating 5-1 defeat on their own patch. Given his turnover of playing personnel over the summer, he perhaps feels it is no longer relevant.

“I had enough reflection at that moment so I don’t want to remind myself of that,” he added. “Different moment, different games. I won’t use it as motivation this time. It is part of the past.

“I didn’t watch the [5-1] game again. I only extracted the goal we scored. That’s all I did. We have competitors in the dressing room, who have that passion to win.

“And the passion to represent this massive club. The team now is in better shape and to do the very best.”

There will be an expectation on Rangers as the home team to take the game to their visitors, with winger Daniel Candeias the most likely out ball wide on the right wing.

“We have a very pacy right wing and the players are gaining an understanding of when one goes forward one stays,” Caixinha said. “Daniel is the player in the league with most deliveries and crosses. That's what I know about him from when I worked with him before and that's the reason I brought him here.

“We spoke last season about wanting more pace out wide and we have it now, especially on the right. There's aggression, speed, and they're ready to perform.”