The Celtic dressing-room leapt to the defence of Gordon Strachan yesterday, with Scott McDonald making a public apology for his touchline row last Saturday that turned supporters against the underpressure manager while Aiden McGeady insisted that Strachan is “too thick-skinned” to walk away from his job because of crowd abuse.

The pair broke the silence around the Scottish champions’ camp after the 1-0 defeat by Motherwell at Celtic Park, which has left Strachan’s team seven points behind Rangers in the Clydesdale Bank Premier League title race. The second-half substitution of McDonald prompted a volatile response from Celtic’s top scorer, which then ignited dissenting fans, and the Australia forward is keen to repair any damage.

“I apologised to the manager and my teammates after the game and again at training today,” McDonald said yesterday. “It was frustration on my part because we were 1-0 down. I’m very passionate and I want to be successful. However, the way I reacted was totally out of order and incorrect and it didn’t help the team.

“For the next ten minutes that upset the crowd at a time when they should have been focusing on what was happening on the pitch. It’s not about me, it’s about the club as a whole. It’s easy pointing fingers at people but there’s only so much a manager can do or say. Gordon Strachan has a belief in me and I’d never question his management skills.”

McDonald and McGeady are both among the four nominees unveiled yesterday for the Royal Mail PFA Scotland Player of the Year award – Barry Robson of Celtic and Carlos Cuellar of Rangers are the others – and used that status to defend Strachan’s successful work since replacing Martin O’Neill in June 2005. McGeady does not expect to see Strachan quit and has not yet given up hope of Celtic overhauling Rangers.

“I expect him to still be here [next season], because he is the type of character who would not want to leave unfinished business,” McGeady said. “I don’t know if he takes too much notice of the abuse. He is quite thick-skinned.

“The criticism coming from the fans seems to say one thing one minute and something different the next two minutes. Fans can sometimes forget fairly quickly. He won the championship for the last two years in a row and taken Celtic into the last 16 of the Champions League as well – and that has never happened before in the club’s history.

“All of a sudden, you hear ‘he should be leaving’ and things like that, but we have had a lot of success. One season without winning any trophies is a big failure, but there’s always next season. Anyway, this season is not finished by any means.

“I’m not saying we have thrown away the league, but we have made it very difficult for ourselves and given Rangers a massive platform to go on and win. It is going to be a massive task for us to try to win the league from here. They have still to come to Celtic Park twice and if we beat them twice, we have a great chance. There’s still a lot of football to be played.” McDonald endorsed that unity. “As far as we are concerned he is our manager and he will be next year and beyond,” the striker said. “I know it’s not up to us but we are more than happy with what he is giving us and he is happy with what we are giving him. We are going through hard times at the moment but his record speaks for itself. There are still a lot of games to be played between now and the end of the season.”

McGeady, whose form has drawn interest from clubs in the Barclays Premier League in England, admitted that succeeding his Shunsuke Nakamura, his teammate, as PFA Scotland Player of the Year would not compensate the 22-year-old if Celtic missed out on a third successive title.

“Winning individual awards is great but at the end of the season you want to come away with silverware and I don’t think any amount of awards can make up for that,” the Ireland midfield player said. “I don’t think we have been playing as a team and our form recently has been very poor. When teams come to Celtic Park they get one chance nowadays and stick it away. In the past they would not score any. We are also not scoring as many as we should be.” McDonald added: “He [Strachan] can’t kick the ball in the back of the net, can he? ”