Sceptics sneered that Gordon Strachan would be out of his depth at Celtic and on Wednesday he might have wished that the waters really would close over his head.

His first game in charge was the most abject episode of the club's European football history, with Artmedia Bratislava winning 5-0 in the second qualifying round of the Champions League. Strachan also judged it the worst night of his 33 years in the sport.

"It's asking for a lot," the manager said of the prospects for recovery in the home leg on Tuesday. Celtic's punishment for the offences in Bratislava will almost certainly be a season of confinement in the dank cell of Scotland's domestic competitions. At this early stage of the Champions League, there is no escape hatch to the Uefa Cup.

Though Strachan's appointment was more accepted than acclaimed by fans, there was no obvious candidate with superior credentials. Celtic would dread sacking him, but he could not survive any overtones of Bratislava in future. John Barnes was dismissed six months into the job during the club's last hapless season.

Wednesday's failure will be traumatic in every respect since Celtic have come to count on the European scene emotionally and financially. Martin O'Neill, Strachan's predecessor, resigned because of his wife's ill health, but even in his last season - with the side in decline - he took creditable draws with Barcelona and Milan from his final two matches in the Champions League.

The excitement of these occasions had become an addiction to the support and Celtic fared well enough to ensure they would be in the tier of second seeds if the team were by some miracle to reach the group stage this year. The club, though, are set to lose more than prestige.

At the time of O'Neill's appointment in 2000, Celtic's turnover was £38 million, but by 2004 that figure had leapt to £69 million.

While the Irishman had ample success in the Scottish Premier League it was the European exploits, including an appearance in the 2003 Uefa Cup final, that expanded the commercial opportunities and, for example, secured a deal with Nike that, luckily for Celtic, was completed in the summer. With one mishandled game in Bratislava Strachan and his players have wiped up to £10 million off the club's income in the year ahead. Celtic cannot have anticipated that worry when they granted him a transfer budget of £7 million, which is 10 times greater than the combined expenditure of the other 11 members of the SPL.

Nonetheless it would be wrong to underestimate the problems that lay in wait for the new manager. O'Neill paid huge wages to keep his squad together, but he therefore saddled himself with an ageing side since there was too little cash left to operate meaningfully in the transfer market. His flaccid team blew the league championship at Motherwell in May.

A transitional season was inevitable for Strachan, but, while there was no golden inheritance for him, he did squander what resources he had on Wednesday.

His tactical decisions in Bratislava were grossly misjudged. With Celtic 2-0 down and the game in a dull phase, he brought on an extra attacker.

"We gambled with three up and it didn't work for us," Strachan remarked, with the understatement of a man in shock.

The enterprising approach taxed his noticeably unfit team and Artmedia, an otherwise undistinguished group, scored three times in the closing quarter of an hour. Strachan may have been undone by his starry-eyed view of the Celtic post.

On the eve of the match with Artmedia he spoke of a need to ditch the damage-limitation mentality that was appropriate to Coventry and Southampton.

It will now have occurred to him that, at the start, he should have been as cautious as ever.