The Light Blues are looking to extend their winning start to 2024 in the Scottish Premiership, but the manager knows they face a difficult challenge in Ayrshire.
Speaking at this afternoon’s pre-match press conference, Clement said: “It is a difficult one, so we will approach it like all of the games with respect for our opponent, but also respect for ourselves.
“We have to play our own game, although we need to adapt to a totally different kind of football because of the pitch. The guys are focused, and they know they need to adapt to other circumstances, and they have respect for the opponent also, about how they are doing things.
“If I’m well informed, they have played six games against the Old Firm this season and they won three, have had one draw and two losses. We are going to go there fully-focused but we know it is one of those dangerous moments that can be a bump on the road.
“The good thing about having four months together is we have trained on a lot of things. At the end I will see danger in every game because if you don’t have respect for your opponent then you become lazy and sloppy, but Kilmarnock, their track record from the last couple of months is really good.
“They’re going to make it a huge fight, we know how they play, and we need to be ready for that.”
Clement spoke of the team spirit in his squad, as he was questioned about rotation and how he is managing playing minutes. He continued: “I think almost all of them want to play every game for sure when you are winning. That is a good thing, they need to focus on what they must do to play a lot of minutes and to do the right things for the team.It's the only way to be there on top every time we want to play football with a lot of intensity.
“You can't do it with the same 12 or 13 players, the team understands the story now, are they totally happy with that all the time no but they are totally happy that they are in the story all together now. They also feel that they're winning a lot of games, and they also get enough minutes to shine and to be in the spotlight.
“There’s a lot of togetherness in this group now. I will give one example, in my debriefing of the last game, we showed several things, what we did well, what we can do better, like always, and one of the things were the goals also. There was a really good assist from John Souttar for Cyriel’s first goal. One of the other centre-backs who didn't play was really looking at him like well done. I told them this makes my day because you show that you're really a team. If you're competing with each other and you can be genuinely happy about somebody else doing something really good, then you're a team.”