The question now is, what is the present mindset of Dermot Desmond? There are Celtic supporters, reporters and columnists who, while trying to fathom the immediate future for Gordon Strachan, would love to be able to peer inside the head of Celtic’s principal shareholder. Suddenly, nothing else matters now around Celtic Park except Desmond’s intentions with regard to Strachan.

The Celtic manager has arrived at that fate of most who take charge of the Old Firm: success comes and goes but, inevitably, the crisis territory looms. After two excellent seasons at the club, Strachan is now experiencing a poor one — if you ignore reaching the last 16 of the Champions League, which is probably harsh — and his future is said to be in the balance.

Saturday’s 1-0 defeat at home to Motherwell all but ended Celtic’s quest to catch Rangers in the Clydesdale Bank Premier League.

Of course, there may be no debate at all to be considered, in terms of Strachan staying or going. I suspect, given his two good seasons out of three, that it won’t be an issue in Desmond’s mind, and that the Irish tycoon will be convinced that Strachan deserves a fourth season at the club.

But what might be more fascinating is Strachan’s own attitude. His Celtic side need significant overhauling: should he hang around to do it, or relieve himself of the burden?

It is worth recalling that Strachan is not sworn to a life in football. After leaving Southampton in 2004, he took 15 months away from the game and, for most of that time, was not exactly hankering to be back in a dugout.

Strachan happily did Match of the Day 2 with Adrian Chiles, and even drifted into sportswriting, penning quite a number of pieces on present trends in the game.

If — or when — he leaves Celtic, he will hardly do so a broken man. Strachan would simply relish his time-out before the next, inevitable offer came along.

There is legitimate intrigue over what his present attitude might be. Strachan is on record as saying that, barring such exceptional cases as Arsène Wenger and Sir Alex Ferguson, three or four years is sometimes as much as a manager can go at a leading club. After that, he told me last year, “it can all be downhill”. While this need not necessarily be true, and managers can build empires at football clubs, in Scotland it is inevitable that the pendulum eventually swings from one Old Firm club back in favour of the other.

The most wounding aspect for Strachan and Celtic this season is that great blasphemy of the Old Firm — the trophy-less season.

In such a scenario, it does not take long for the calls for a manager’s dismissal to be heard, and some were at it in force at Celtic Park on Saturday. For such supporters, past feats are irrelevant — there is no such thing as credit in the bank. It did for Dick Advocaat and Alex McLeish at Rangers when their time came, and, unless Desmond decrees otherwise, it could do for Strachan as well.

Whether the present Celtic manager stays or goes, he will have to face up to his failures in this 2007-08 season. In the face of Rangers, Strachan’s strategy on the park has proved second-rate, and all three tiers of his team — defence, midfield and attack — appear to need radical surgery.

Massimo Donati, a plodding, one-paced Italian midfield player, is the embodiment of a team-rebuilding job last summer that went wrong for Celtic. Moreover, on Saturday, while Motherwell charged through the centre of Celtic’s defence to score, a recurring ailment of the team was highlighted once more.

In truth, Strachan would need to buy three or four key players for a new Celtic side next season. His critics argue that this is a man who couldn’t be trusted with £10 million to spend in the summer. The logic thus follows that Desmond, weighing up all the evidence, will relieve Strachan of his post. My feeling is that it won’t come to that, and, if Strachan wishes, that he will carry on at Celtic. But reading Strachan’s own mind is just as impossible as trying to read that of Desmond.