Deja vu can be torturous at times.

On Tuesday, at Celtic Park, you could have been forgiven for believing that we had been transported back in time to some of the bad old days, when too often we would depart this old fixture seeking palliative care.

It all had a painful familiarity. In another age this performance might have provoked public hostility and even ridicule, I thought as the ghost of winters past came floating in front of me, firstly in the shape of Willie Ormond's debut against the English in 1973 on a frosty Hampden pitch when he suffered a 5-0 whipping. At one stage it looked as if the outcome at Celtic Park was heading in the same direction, and that was scary enough. I'll desist from mentioning other dismal memories, lest I appear to be on the verge of asking for Christmas to be cancelled now.

Experience should have accustomed me to sombre analysis given that I could write a thesis about unexpected train crashes I have witnessed on a football field. I have to suppose I was not alone in being taken aback by how puny Scotland looked. Perhaps we should have known better. The England fixture truly gave me the creeps since I felt that the commercial aspect of it superseded every other consideration, including the Scottish Football Association giving the impression they were asking the Tartan Army to help finance the lowering of the national debt. The game seemed designed for anti-climax and we were truly delivered a special edition.

This is the annoying factor of all because, despite trying to put the defeat into some sensible perspective, there is no doubt that it has taken something of the gloss off prior achievements and might exhume that ancient anxiety of ours that in punching above our weight, sooner or later we'll renew acquaintance with the canvas in more significant games.

Almost overnight the players had become ghostly in appearance by comparison with the red-blooded apparitions that fought the Irish to the last. That punishing affair has turned out to be a huge factor. Much of the vitality looked sucked out of them and you could sense their weariness even in the first quarter of the game.

On the other hand England looked the part. They were refreshed and bigger and stronger and utterly unfazed by the atmosphere, which had been mistakenly hyped up to make it appear they could possibly wilt amidst a crescendo of decibels. Unless my eyes were mistaken they seemed to be enjoying themselves from the very outset.

It won't lead to sleepless nights for Gordon Strachan. Of course he has been pained this week. So have I. But think of the man's experience in Scotland with Celtic. Think too of the infamous occasion of a defeat at home to Motherwell when obscenities were chanted at him from the Jock Stein Stand suggesting he should pack his bags and go, insensitively ignoring his achievements with them, which included qualifying the club for the last 16 of the Champions League for the first time in a decade.

Interviewing him that day I found him gaunt and sullen; he sounded as if he just heard a good friend had died. By then he had become truculent with the press, dismissive of them in a waspish manner as he had discovered that, in the Old Firm jungle, a machete is a handy tool.

So when he reached the Scotland post, via acute managerial disappointments in England with Middlesbrough, he had become long inured to the fickle nature of the game and you feel now he has reached his personal apotheosis with his tenure something he was simply born for. That is of huge benefit to his players. For he talks plain sense often, even when he strayed out of his brief recently and used the word 'manipulate' in referring to a means of bringing Hearts, Hibernian and Rangers up to the SPFL Premiership, thus inciting the wrath of the politically correct who conveniently forget that every league reconstruction is in fact 'manipulation' given the motivation of sheer self-interest in football. Yet he said it and it chimed with many people.

His team talks clearly chime with the players, for his squad has achieved much against reputably solid sides and has done so by playing entertaining football in a manner few Scottish teams have equalled in the past, including those packed with so-called world-class players.

His sixth defeat in 17 games as Scotland's manager is a sobering reminder to us of how his task is shaped by a pool of talent that is shallower than that of the bigger nations. But he has the luxury of knowing that any post mortem will be devoid of recrimination largely because of what has been achieved in the games that really mattered.

It is a long way off but, with Martin O'Neill muttering about revenge in a 'we wuz robbed' manner ahead of Scotland heading across the Irish Sea for another Euro 2016 qualifier in June, you can see that Dublin might be renamed Donnybrook for the occasion. It will determine whether all the good that has been achieved in the group will become drastically undone or virtually fly us to the moon.

A Scotland win there would make the English match one of colossal insignificance. Until the next time.