Kasper Schmeichel says that triggering his option of another season at Celtic is the last thing on his mind at the moment, with the veteran keeper’s focus solely on helping his side to a victory over Rangers in Sunday’s League Cup final.
The 38-year-old has been in outstanding form since he replaced Joe Hart as the club’s first choice keeper in the summer, and he turned in another impressive display to help his team keep a second consecutive away clean sheet in the Champions League with the midweek draw against Dinamo Zagreb.
His form has earned praise from manager Brendan Rodgers and has already won over the Celtic support, who will be eager to see the Danish number one remain at the club beyond this season. But while Schmeichel is loving his experience in Glasgow so far, he isn’t thinking about extending his stay just yet.
When asked where his mind was on his longer-term future, Schmeichel said: “The next game.
“I think the one thing experience has really taught me is to never take anything for granted. Take every single day as it comes. Enjoy every single game that you get to play. And then we take it from there.
“At the moment, it’s not even on my radar. The most important thing is winning on Sunday now.”
To do that, Schmeichel will be leaning on all of that experience, and will be urging his teammates to approach the Old Firm final at Hampden as though it was any other match.
“I think in these types of games, it’s important for us as players to take the emotion out of the game, to play the game, not the occasion,” he said.
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“We need to play it with precision and make sure that we hit the standards that we’ve set, and we keep being ambitious, we keep pushing forward.
“I think it’s a great occasion, particularly for the fans. [But] like I said before, I think for us as players, it’s about removing the emotion from the game and playing the game and not getting caught up in the emotion and the occasion.
“Our job is to go and win a football match and I think that’s how we should approach it.”
When Schmeichel joined Celtic, his manager Rodgers said he was pleased for the keeper to be getting ‘the Celtic experience’ at this stage of his career, and he says it isn’t just the opportunity to lift silverware that motivated him to join the club, but the magnitude of every single game.
“To be honest, I think it’s every occasion,” he said.
“I think when you join a club like Celtic, the size of the club, everywhere you go, you even see [in Zagreb] how many fans that travel. That’s not normal. I’ve played in a lot of clubs and that’s not normal that you have that amount of support everywhere you go.
“So, those are the reasons, of course. One of the big reasons. But one of the reasons also is to perform and to get results for all those people who travel, spend a lot of money to come in and support their team. They’re just as important occasions.
“You look around, every single photo on the wall is of some kind of legend lifting a trophy, so you know what’s expected.”
