Winning is the sole focus for Celtic midfielder Arne Engels when they face Rangers as he dismissed suggestions they might have something to prove.
Celtic go into Sunday’s Parkhead derby with a 16-point lead in the Scottish Premiership, with the Premier Sports Cup in their trophy room, and a place in the Scottish Gas Scottish Cup semi-finals booked.
Rangers went out of the cup at the fifth round against Queen’s Park and only have Europa League progress to play for with the title race all but over.
However, bragging rights remain significant in Glasgow and Rangers produced a 3-0 win over their rivals on January 2 to deliver Celtic’s first defeat of the domestic campaign.
The nature of the defeat was hard for Celtic to take but Engels simply wants three points on Sunday rather than making a statement.
“We just want to win and that’s the most important thing,” the Belgium international said. “It doesn’t need to be always pretty. We just need to win and that’s our main focus now on every game.
“We just need to win and don’t need to show everybody how good we are because we showed it already a lot of times.
“It’s now about winning every game and that’s always our mindset and it will always be our mindset every week.
“Nobody needs to be motivated for that game. Everybody knows what kind of game it is and what kind of game everybody wants to have.
“We are really ready for it and everybody is really focused now on that game.”
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Manager Brendan Rodgers admitted their lengthy lead in the title race might have been a factor in their Ibrox performance, and his team have extended their advantage since.
Engels said: “We just have the mentality of winning every game and that’s what we did already the whole year and what we are going to do now the next weeks.
“Just going into every game with our winning mentality and with a lot of energy, which has allowed us to produce really good results and really good performances.
“We just need to keep on going like this and not look too much forward. Just to the next game and going there with full energy and full focus.”
Celtic will have the advantage of a full week to prepare following their 2-0 Scottish Cup win over Hibernian. Although Rangers had a free weekend, they face Fenerbahce in the second leg of their Europa League last-16 tie on Thursday night.
The Hibs tie came after Celtic’s first free midweek in 11 weeks.
“Of course it’s nice, we can prepare every game a little bit more,” Engels said. “It’s always nice to have some training days and also relax a bit, not always to go 100 per cent the next day or two days later.”
The former Augsburg player was not complaining about the busy schedule in previous weeks.
“I loved it actually because you’re just in a mindset to win and to go every three days and you know that the next game is already there,” he said. “So I really loved it and I think we did also really well in those months.”
