(Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)
The build-up has barely begun to the match which will decide the destiny of the Scottish Premier League for 2008-09, and already there are growing calls for Celtic manager Gordon Strachan to quit or be sacked.
Let's just think about that for a second. A manager who has a 100 percent record of league wins and the chance to clinch a fourth consecutive title has some so-called "fans" calling for his head on a spike.
If truth be told, Gordon Strachan has never been popular with a significant percentage of Celtic fans, and a myriad of reasons have been put forward to explain it.
Some say the manager is not "Celtic-minded."
It would seem these doubters prefer a manager who grew up a Celtic fan, preferably someone who previously played for the club—and if he's a Catholic, so much the better. Success on the pitch is secondary to that. For a tiny, lunatic fringe, that may well be the case, but these factors are irrelevant to the majority of supporters.
There is a theory that too much bad blood carried over from Strachan's time at Aberdeen. An impish midfielder, he was an instrumental part of some painful defeats for Celtic in the late '70s and early '80s.
That doesn't explain it for me either. He left Aberdeen 25 years ago, so surely mature adults in their late '30s and older would be over that by now? Not many people younger than that will remember his Aberdeen days.
The next theory is that he is contemptuous of the press. I would have expected that to endear him to most Celtic fans, who regard the press in Scotland as the "Laptop Loyal," little more than propaganda mouthpieces for David Murray and Rangers.
The theory I find most convincing is that Strachan simply is not Martin O'Neill.
"The Blessed Martin" restored Celtic to something approaching the stature they last enjoyed in the game in the early 1970s. He was wildly popular with the fans, and it cannot be denied that his Irish Catholic background did him no harm on that score.
O'Neill was an impossible act to follow from a public relations point of view.
That might explain Strachan's initial difficulty in winning over the fans, but there is little doubt why he has failed to do it.
The football produced by Celtic in the Strachan era—interspersed as it has been with some outstanding performances and epic Champions League victories—can best be described as functional.
For people reared on a diet of passed-on tales of Patsy Gallacher, Jimmy McGrory, Charlie Tully, Jimmy Johnstone, Kenny Dalglish, Paul McStay and Henrik Larsson, entertainment is not an optional extra. It is for them an integral part of the Celtic experience. It's not enough for Celtic to be the best, they have to be the best to watch too.
Yet, are the expectations heaped on Gordon Strachan's shoulders realistic?
Before he left Celtic in 2005, Martin O'Neill warned the club's followers to get ready for life "in the slow lane."
O'Neill inherited a core of players like Henrik Larsson, Paul Lambert, Johan Mjallby, Lubo Moravcik and Stiliyan Petrov. Each of them at their peak would walk straight into today's team.
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