Celtic midfielder Arne Engels, main picture, and Belgian great Kevin De Bruyne, inset (Image: SNS)
Celtic midfielder Arne Engels, main picture, and Belgian great Kevin De Bruyne, inset (Image: SNS)
ARNE Engels has stressed there is no prospect of him resting on his laurels if he helps Celtic to win the Scottish Gas Scottish Cup and complete a domestic treble this month - having seen the level he must aspire to working alongside Belgian great Kevin De Bruyne.
Engels has gone a long way towards justifying the club record £11m transfer fee which the Scottish champions paid German club Augsburg for him on the final day of the summer window last year.
The midfielder has established himself as a regular first team starter at Parkhead and helped the Glasgow giants to reach the Champions League knockout rounds, lift the Premier Sports Cup and retain the William Hill Premiership.
However, the 21-year-old, who is hoping to receive a call-up from his country for the World Cup qualifiers against North Macedonia and Wales next month, has seen how Manchester City great De Bruyne applies himself when he is on international duty.
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Asked if his legendary compatriot was an inspiration for him ahead of the league match against Aberdeen tonight, Engels said, “Yeah, of course. When I am in the national team I always try to learn things from those big players. But it is the same here. I'm always trying to learn from everybody.
“It's not only the big players that you're learning from because every player has their own qualities and their own way of doing things. You can add everything to your game and try to steal everything with your eyes.
“But, of course, it helps me a lot when you're in the national team and training with those great players. You see how they behave on the training pitch and how they adapt themselves to some kind of situations.
“You're looking to those players, but also in the Champions League if you watch the semi-finals and the other quarter-finals and you see so many good players and trying to see how they behave and how they do. It's always a good thing to see that.”
(Image: Craig Foy - SNS Group)
He added: “He (De Bruyne) is just a normal guy like everybody else. That's also a really good thing to have in the national team, that those big players can just speak to everybody and speak to the younger guys, help them with every kind of situation and also try to manage them a bit, how they need to behave next to the pitch and stuff.
“He has also been captain from the national team for a while so of course you need to look and need to listen and respect those players. He’s been a wonderful player for so many years now, with so many goals, so many assists, for his club.
“There are not a lot of players who are doing that at this age. He's showing it every week if he gets the playing time that he's one of the best midfielders in the world.”
De Bruyne is set to bring his trophy-laden 10 year spell at City to an end this month and speculation is rampant about where he will move to next. But Engels joked that he will not be urging his countryman to move to Celtic. “He's in my position so I'm not going to do that!” he said.
Celtic and Rangers fans have debated at length who is the better Belgian midfielder this season – Parkhead mainstay Engels or Ibrox favourite Raskin.
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However, the former Club Brugge kid only cares about the fact that they are both making football supporters in their homeland sit up and take notice of the Scottish game.
“That's always the aim,” he said. “If you do good people are watching it so I hope if we are doing good that the people over there in Belgium are also watching the game. If there is a Belgian playing in a club somewhere or in a league or at home that everybody wants to watch it.
“I hope so it’s good for Belgian football. I think we have a really good generation coming up. We still need to improve a lot, but everybody is still young, everybody is really talented. So we are in a really good way and we have a lot of really good players. Hopefully that will be really good for the Belgium national team in the end.”