Celtic fans furiously demand three players should be removed from the club along with Wilfried after 3-1 defeat to Mirren

Wilfried Nancy looks traumatised by Celtic crisis as he ventures into nightmare territory – Keith Jackson
Jacko insists this isn’t time to sack Nancy but his long term prospects won’t exist if he keeps being outflanked as he was at Hampden

To lose his first game in charge could be described as a misfortune. To lose a second a couple of days later? Well that looked a little bit too much like carelessness for a Celtic new manager.

But to crash to a third consecutive loss in the first domestic cup final of the season? Against St Mirren?

No, this is now venturing very much into nightmarish territory for a Frenchman who must be starting to wonder if these last eight or nine days have been some sort of real life fever dream.

And Wilfried Nancy’s mum thought her son had bags under his eyes last week? The poor guy looked so utterly traumatised on the sidelines at the national stadium yesterday that he might be too scared to go to bed in case he’s haunted by the experience again in the dead of night.

Losing at home to Hearts could just about be excused given that he had only just set foot in the country to take over from Martin O’Neill. Even if it did look very much from a distance as if he had been completely outmanoeuvred tactically by Tynecastle’s disruptor in chief, Derek McInnes.

To go down to a second straight loss against Roma in the Europa League was another crushing disappointment but, again, these things can happen against that calibre of opposition, even if it meant Nancy became the first Celtic manager in the club’s proud history to lose his opening two matches.

But yesterday? No, this was the one game of the three that he couldn’t so much as contemplate losing and, now that he has, he finds himself at the heart of a crisis situation less than a fortnight into the job.

One or two Celtic supporters had been noisily calling for his head in the build up to this trip to Hampden which was a ridiculous overreaction even by the standards of Glasgow’s goldfish bowl environment.

But those calls will now grow louder and greater in number on the back of a 3-1 thrashing which was no more than St Mirren deserved.

It’s been 12 years since the Paisley club last lifted silverware and if they have to go another decade or so before they do it again then it probably won’t matter a damn because this was as sweet as it gets.

They didn’t just match Celtic blow for blow. They pounded at them until the champions could feel their legs buckling beneath them.

Manager Stephen Robinson stressed time and again before kick-off that a cup final win would have to go down as one of the all time shocks, given the financial chasm which separates this pair.

But, after spending hours studying Nancy’s preferred system and picking holes all over it, he was able to put what he had learned perfectly into practice.

His players believed in his big game strategy and they carried it out to the letter. And each and every one of them deserves their place they now claim in the club’s history.

But Nancy? He will have to pull up a chair in a darkened room and attempt to figure out how things went so horribly and spectacularly wrong. And accept that he himself has contributed to a season which has crashed off the tracks since his own appointment.

Of course, it’s not time to remove him from the premises, even if sections of the Celtic support will now be convinced that drastic action is required.

But Nancy cannot hope to continue for the long haul if he continues to be out flanked and out thought on the sidelines as he was again yesterday.

The first task for Robinson was to take a good look at Nancy’s line-up, digest it and then set about figuring out exactly what the Frenchman wanted his side to look like on grass as opposed to paper.

The presence of Anthony Ralston’s name on the list of starters certainly threw a spanner into the works. Had it been a straight switch – had Ralston simply been preferred to fill the right wing back role – then St Mirren’s prep work wouldn’t have been too complicated.

Or, for the matter, had Nancy been forced into a radical rethink and tempted to reinstate a defensive back four then, again, it would have been straightforward enough for Robinson to make his own adjustments albeit at the eleventh hour.

But, in fact, Ralston was actually another example of a new manager jamming a round peg into a square hole in an attempt to implement his own vision.

The Scotland man was deployed at the right hand side of Nancy’s back three which, in itself, triggered a domino chain of positional tweaks and changes elsewhere on the pitch. Confused? Celtic certainly looked like it,

And especially after falling behind just 90 seconds into this showpiece event when St Mirren skipper Marcus Fraser arced a perfectly placed glancing header in off the base of Kasper Schmeichel’s right hand post after shrugging off marker Hatate with almost contemptuous ease.

Had they doubled their lead during these frantic early exchanges – and they very well might have done – then this contest could have got away from Nancy who looked on from the sidelines as if lost in a world of his own.

Dan Nlundulu almost certainly should have notched a second from close range after some superb set-up work but the striker’s effort was jabbed wide of the target and Celtic reacted to this close escape by giving themselves a much needed collective shake.

Tierney and Scales were attacking at will down the left, helped from the inside by Arnie Engles and Maeda. On the other side Tounekti and Ralston were not combining to the same effect with Callum McGregor and Hatate but, even so, Celtic were imposing themselves on the contest.

And yet, with players abandoning positions in the rush to get forward, Celtic also looked vulnerable to the counter attack. And St Mirren’s players could smell it.

So when Johan Ayunga headed them back in front just after the hour the sky began to fall in on top of Nancy and his team. Ayunga’s second and St Mirren’s third merely confirmed it.