I believe I heard the first call of the wild the other night on one of the radio phone-ins – that medium for the considerate and reasonable-minded among us – and it went like this: “See, if Gordon Strachan fails to win the title this year... see, after some of the signings he’s made... that should be it for Strachan, he should be sacked.” It would seem a harsh punishment to me, but that is how football is. It lives for the present, the past is but dust. According to some Celtic supporters, what Strachan has achieved in the near-three years since he arrived at Celtic Park is a total irrelevance. Instead, put simply, if he can’t deliver a third successive title, then he should be taken out and shot. They shoot horses, don’t they?

It’s not my intention to defend Strachan here. He is walking a tightrope this season, his team is jarring, it is plain for all to see. Some of his big signings, such as Massimo Donati, have failed to convince and as a result the chemistry of Celtic, with the club’s manager groping to find his best team, is constantly being disrupted. There are grounds aplenty for the grouching and griping that are currently emitting from the stands of Celtic Park.

But a managerial beheading? Just how daft can we get? It is amazing how some football supporters apply a kind of totalitarian brand of justice that they wouldn’t think of affording to any other line of work.

When Strachan replaced Martin O’Neill in June 2005 he could have, had he so wished, offered one golden promise to the Celtic supporters, which would have had them eating out of his hand. If Strachan had said, “I promise you, I will give you two successive titles and two qualifications from the group stages of the Champions League”, the Celtic punters would have been agog.

O’Neill, the messiah, couldn’t work the trick of getting beyond the Champions League’s group stages in his various stabs at it. As much as we quote the fact, it is an underrated Strachan achievement.

This season, however, all is not well at Celtic. Strachan has signed a number of players, such as Donati, Gary Caldwell and Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink, who have attracted their critics. The received wisdom is that these players are not good enough, or, in the cases of Donati and Vennegoor of Hesselink, have not been worth the money spent on them.

It is certainly true, and this is normally a telltale sign, that Celtic now have a tendency to “talk down” the amounts they actually paid for the Italian and the Dutchman.

There are, I believe, too many twists left in the championship plot to be emphatic about outcomes, yet Celtic could well finish runners-up to Rangers in two months’ time. Strachan’s record, on top of any European feats, would thus read: title, title, runner-up in three seasons. A sacking offence? I don’t think so. But it would certainly, and correctly, heap the pressure on him to produce success in next season, or else.

The intrigue is, it may not come down to whether Celtic should sack their manager, as brutal as the scenario sounds. On the contrary, Strachan may wish to leave. On more than one occasion he has said that “three or four years is enough” to be steering a top club and that “it can be all downhill after that”. Strachan said as much to me when I interviewed him for The Times last year. Intermittently these days, the Celtic manager will certainly be considering his future.

Strachan has been a success at Celtic, and if he secures three titles in a row, his record will be unarguable. His problem is, if it becomes two out of three, a lynch-mob will start to gather.

European pedigree

There is no doubt that strange things can happen in the Uefa Cup. This season, we have teams like Getafe probing the higher reaches of the tournament, just like in 2003 when Celtic faced mighty Boavista at the semi-final stage. Europe’s second-tier club tournament can certainly attract a weird and wonderful cast.

Nonetheless, I will personally revel in Rangers’ efforts to reach the final, and the club’s name, for all its woes of recent years, still carries glamour on the Continent. In Spain, Germany and Italy, no writer or reporter, looking at the Uefa Cup’s last eight, will be saying: “Pah, Rangers... what sort of tournament is this?” On the contrary, the Old Firm carry a lustre which never ceases to amaze whenever you engage a foreign football writer in conversation.

The truly weird thing about the current Rangers team is it sometimes makes an art-form out of grafting. Walter Smith said it himself in Bremen on Thursday night: “We know that sometimes we’re not pretty to watch.” Three weeks ago, Lee McCulloch told a huddle of reporters that “sometimes it pays to win ugly”. The subtext seems clear. Perhaps Lionel Messi, with his “antifootball” jibe at Rangers, had a point.

It doesn’t matter. In Barry Ferguson, Brahim Hemdani, Chris Burke and Kevin Thomson, Rangers have a nucleus of fine footballers. And when muscle is added, in players like McCulloch, Smith’s team can be formidable. Rangers can certainly see off Sporting Lisbon and reach the semi-finals – but then a true football test will come.

Albertz haul?

I was a fan of Jorg Albertz as a player – but what I’m not a fan of is the scenario whereby these footballing dinosaurs come lumbering back on to the scene, as Albertz is now doing with John Brown’s Clyde.

I’ll give this Albertz return to action a month, maximum, before it fizzles out. It is always the same with these guys.

The German midfield player was a fine Rangers player, but, having puffed and wheezed his way through training with Clyde the other day, the 37-year-old admitted to being “nowhere near match fit – to say otherwise would be outrageous”. What, exactly, is the point of these old crocks making such comebacks?

Talking to Auntie

I notice ’Arry Redknapp is back happily babbling to the BBC after his boycott of the channel following the Panorama bungs business. Redknapp was in a huff with the Beeb for a while but, with his team now riding high in the Premier League, he doesn’t mind having his face back on camera.

Sir Alex Ferguson, meanwhile, maintains his long-standing black-out of the Beeb, for all sorts of reasons. And Sir Furious, I believe, is winning his own particular battle. So dull, so monotonous to listen to is Carlos Queiroz, Fergie’s assistant, on Match Of The Day, that the Beeb executives must crave having Fergie back.