The fringe benefits of Thursday night’s 3-2 victory by a relatively inexperienced Celtic side over Real Betis didn’t end at the final whistle as far as Ange Postecoglou is concerned.

The Celtic manager is hoping the fringe festival carries on into the weekend with the visit of Motherwell for Sunday's 3pm kick-off in the SPFL with a whole troupe of rested players who either didn’t feature in the midweek Europa League clash, or made a cameo appearance being fit and ready to go with recharged batteries.

And the manager is intent on the same winning formula carrying on from Thursday night to maintain a 12-game unbeaten and five-game winning run in domestic football.

He said: “That’s our standards, we want to go into it and show the same energy and carry on from our recent form. It’s going to be important because Motherwell are in good form themselves and they’ll be hard to break down.

“But we’ve just got to bring the same energy we bring to games, and know that we can put pressure on them and hopefully get right result.”

After the luxury of having a settled team and the option to field the same starting XI consecutively recently for the first time this season, the manager grasped the opportunity to turn that on its head on Thursday and made a complete 11 changes to the side that tore Dundee United apart last weekend.

That was done with the traditional December glut of games in mind and that means that those who had some much-needed time out on Thursday will now return with a spring in their step.

The manager said: “That’s the plan, they had a good opportunity on Thursday night to have not too many minutes and some of them needed a bit of a breather, so it’ll be good to get them back and we’re going to need them.

‘Because, as I said, we’ve got games coming thick and fast and we want to maintain our levels, our energy and our intensity, so it’s important they come in to do that.’

“Most teams come here set up to try and stop us, and a couple have come away with draws which I guess shows that it can work on certain days.

“It won’t change our approach, whatever they decide to do, we’ll play our football and hopefully, as I said, put some pressure on and be the dominant team we can be.”

Manager aims for feel-good factor to continue against Motherwell