Hugh Keevins: Deila's Seven Day Trial Of Strength

There's one barometer that would measure exactly how far backwards Celtic have gone over the last three years.

If Ronny Deila's side were playing Rangers instead of Dundee in their next league game on Sunday afternoon, who would win ?

The hard core element within the Celtic support would take offence at the question being posed in the first place and laugh at the very suggestion that a win for Rangers was even a remote possibility.

But they are representative of those who have been hunched in a corner with their eyes closed and their fingers in their ears since the end of Saturday's defeat from Aberdeen at Pittodrie.

If there was an Old Firm match this weekend the outcome would be debatable, and that's a fact able to be acknowledged by those who are honest with themselves and also able to use the evidence of their own eyes where both sides are concerned.

In the meantime Deila has seven days in which to disprove the theory that, the higher the tension, the more confused he appears to become in terms of team selection, substitutions and tactical approach.

Show Ronny a big occasion, particularly in Europe, and he'll get it wrong.

I said after the win I had predicted for Aberdeen that I feared for Celtic in Amsterdam on Thursday night, and that sense of apprehension remains intact.

The Dutch side, like Celtic, may be a pale imitation of their former selves, but they have the ability to further underline the collectively catastrophic defending that has booby trapped the start to Deila's season on a domestic and European level.

It's not just that, as a rear-guard unit, Celtic couldn't keep pigeons out of a loft. Individually speaking, the likes of Dedryck Boyata, Tyler Blackett and Efe Ambrose look like poor players who won't suddenly blossom into better ones by Thursday night.

And then there's the strange case of Jozo Simunovic. The Croat was signed for £5.5m from Red Star Belgrade and immediately became Celtic's most expensive signing for a decade, but he wasn't thought right for the game at Pittodrie and looked on while inferior players to him were demonstrating an inability to do their defensive jobs properly.

Simunovic wasn't thought to be ready for the white hot heat of Pittodrie and the challenge of players like Adam Rooney and Johnny Hayes, but he will, presumably, be fine to make his Celtic debut in the Amsterdam Arena.

Run that past me again.

Jozo will need to hit the ground running in any case because Deila can't afford a night of humiliation in Holland.

If the Norwegian is to be given another opportunity to see if he can get Celtic into the group stages of the Champions League at the start of next season, assuming he can win the Premiership title by holding off Aberdeen, then he needs to avoid a disastrous Europa League campaign that calls his coaching credentials into serious doubt.

But his squad looks disjointed and distinctly ill at ease. If you took Leigh Griffiths out of the team then Celtic would carry no threat at all in an attacking sense, and yet the SFA will, in all probability, do that to Celtic over the player's comments that the referee, Craig Thomson, deliberately refused to send off Aberdeen's Andrew Considine at the weekend.

Thomson's performance was unquestionably inadequate, being unfair to both teams with his decisions, but it is likely that his display will be disregarded while Griffiths pays the suspension penalty imposed on the outspoken.

And if anything does go horribly wrong for Celtic against Ajax then the domestic front without the league's top scorer will become a trying environment. Not that it hasn't become that way even with Griffiths in the team.

It should have been the case that, while Rangers were consigned to the lower orders after beginning the process of liquidation three years ago, Celtic opened up a gap between the clubs, on and off the park, that would take a long time to bridge.

That hasn't happened and Rangers now have a management team in place which looks capable of threatening the balance of power within the game here.

Celtic's best players have gone and their movement in the transfer market has been hit and miss.

Deila is under pressure as never before and his margin for error has disappeared, which will be shown when Dundee play in front of a reduced, but none the less demanding, crowd on Sunday.

He wasn't first choice for the Celtic job and it was never the intention to put him in charge of the first team until others turned the post down, but now those who told Neil Lennon and then Roy Keane that Deila had to be part of the management structure will be hoping that Ronny can pass this upcoming test of his nerve and capabilities.

Otherwise big calls are going to have to be made if things go pear shaped.

Failure to win a domestic league that doesn't contain Rangers provides automatic grounds for dismissal. There can't even be any debate over that point, surely.

Inability to handle Europe's second tier competition illustrates the need to think again when it comes to who should be entrusted with the job of gaining qualification for the Champions League.

The balance sheet shows the price of failure to be steep on that front.

Deila's shoulders will need to be broad to burden that lot with a defence that has to be somehow transformed into being merely competent.