“After some big scoop then are yer?”, Steven Gerrard asks me as I prepare question one to my friend, former team-mate and now Rangers manager.

As the tape recorder starts, I have to admit it feels strange. This is not so much an interview as an Anfield reunion.

We’re meeting in an Edinburgh hotel as Gerrard oversees final arrangements ahead of Rangers’ pre-Christmas fixture with Hibernian. Another former Liverpool teammate, Gary McAllister, is nearby. So too is Liverpool’s former club doctor, Mark Waller, who joined Stevie at Ibrox.

As players we wondered if a day like this would come, one of us managing while the other works in the media. Gerrard has made sacrifices I could not make to become a coach.

I want to know how he feels about this and what kind of football he wants his team to play.

I want to know where he now sees his management career evolving and whether he believes two of England’s finest players in recent history – he and Frank Lampard – are to become part of the golden generation of coaches.

But first I want to know what he has found to be the biggest difference between being captain of one of Britain’s biggest clubs to managing.