There is a suspicion that Scott Brown could take the huff if he lost the ball in a garden kick-about with his pre-school sons.

The midfielder bristles with indignation the minute he pulls his boots on, regardless of the occasion. It is his drive, his energy and his hunger that Celtic so badly need to rub off on some of those around him.

One Dons punter at Pittodrie branded him an “imposter” on a football pitch, but in truth his value to Celtic is substantial, as has been witnessed over the couple of months that he has spent on the sidelines with a knee injury.

Where Deila is calm and measured – and it is difficult to imagine him ever really letting fly in the dressing room – his captain adopts a far more Scottish approach when things are not going well.

Brown walked off the Aberdeen pitch on Wednesday night quietly fuming. He had already unleashed his ire on new Danish addition, Erik Sviatchenko, believing he stood off Jonny Hayes a fraction too long, thereby allowing the Aberdeen forward the requisite time and space to unleash that rasping opening goal.

“I’m never happy after a defeat,” said Brown. “We played not too bad, to be fair ,we just didn’t create as many chances as we maybe should have with the amount of possession we had.”

One of the accusations that has been laid at the door of the Celtic players this week is that they have given up playing for Deila. It was a suggestion that Brown was quick to refute.

“No matter who the manager is, whoever is the manager at the time, the players give 110 per cent,” he said. “We worked just as hard but we didn’t create as many chances as we should have. We know that and we’ve taken that on the chin. We need to go and work on that now and go and develop and see what we can do in the next few games because it’s going to be a hard few games.

“I think we still have players there and we have players coming back who have that. Charlie Mulgrew has been a big miss for us for a big part of the season and he’s definitely got that, he loves the club, he fights, he wants to win and that’s what we need to show a lot more of.”

There has been a persistent thread of defensive vulnerability that has plagued Celtic this season and it is not just in Europe where they have specialised in the concession of soft goals.

Last season the Parkhead side conceded just 17 league goals, a stat that eclipsed a season best that had stood since 1919, but this season they have already shipped 21 goals in 24 games.

That, coupled, with a belief that the team wilts under any kind of scrutiny has given Celtic the look of a team short of any significant backbone this season.

“That’s just an easy thing to say, it’s a natural thing to say, that you shrink, you go down,” said Brown. “But it wasn’t like that. If you watch the [Aberdeen] game we continued to do what we were doing in the first 30 minutes and then they got a corner and put a great ball in the box and got a header and it’s muddled in and somehow got in as well.

“But we’ve come out in the second half and brought the big man on and he’s a powerhouse, he was holding the ball up and causing all sorts of problems. We changed the formation and put two up front. We kept them in, we camped them in the whole second half, and we had a lot of possession but not really done too much with it.

“Yeah, to go 2-0 down to a good team like Aberdeen, which they are, everyone knows they are, is always going to be hard. We lost three goals at the weekend to Ross County as well. We can’t keep losing so many goals.”

The disintegration of Celtic’s Treble aspirations means that all focus now has to be on the Scottish Cup and the Ladbrokes Premier League title.

There is a feeling that it may not be enough to quieten the unrest felt among the Celtic support at the minute but Brown believes that it has to be the focal point for now.

Deila’s men take on East Kilbride tomorrow afternoon and any slip-up is unthinkable against the Lowland side.

“Winning a double always makes it a good season,” insisted the Celtic captain. “But it was disappointing the way we went out of the League Cup.

“It is always hard playing against 11 with 10, especially for around 70 minutes. We just need to learn to keep ourselves in the game more, keep it nice and compact. You know you need to defend well.

“We felt we could still go on to score goals against Ross County with 10 men and that’s why we left ourselves open a little bit.”