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Just a quarter of an hour after Celtic released the announcement of Brendan Rodgers' surprising resignation via a brief short statement, the bombshell landed, courtesy of Dermot Desmond, with whiskers twitching in apparent anger.

In an extensive statement, major shareholder Desmond savaged his former ally.

The man he convinced to come to the team when Rangers were gaining ground in 2016 and needed putting back in a box. Plus the man he again relied on after the previous manager left for another club in the summer of 2023.

Such was the ferocity of his takedown, the jaw-dropping return of Martin O'Neill was practically an secondary note.

Twenty years after his departure from the club, and after much of his recent life was dedicated to an unending series of public speaking engagements and the playing of all his past successes at the team, O'Neill is back in the manager's seat.

For now - and perhaps for a while. Considering things he has expressed lately, he has been keen to get another job. He'll see this one as the ultimate chance, a gift from the Celtic Gods, a homecoming to the environment where he enjoyed such success and adulation.

Will he give it up readily? You wouldn't have thought so. Celtic might well make a call to contact Postecoglou, but O'Neill will act as a balm for the time being.

All-out Attempt at Reputation Destruction'

O'Neill's reappearance - however strange as it is - can be parked because the biggest 'wow!' moment was the brutal manner Desmond wrote of the former manager.

It was a forceful endeavor at defamation, a labeling of Rodgers as untrustful, a source of falsehoods, a spreader of falsehoods; divisive, deceptive and unacceptable. "A single person's desire for self-preservation at the expense of everyone else," stated Desmond.

For a person who values decorum and sets high importance in business being conducted with discretion, if not complete privacy, this was a further example of how abnormal situations have grown at the club.

Desmond, the club's dominant presence, moves in the margins. The absentee totem, the one with the authority to take all the major calls he pleases without having the responsibility of explaining them in any public forum.

He does not attend club annual meetings, dispatching his son, Ross, instead. He rarely, if ever, gives media talks about the team unless they're hagiographic in nature. And still, he's slow to speak out.

There have been instances on an rare moment to defend the organization with private messages to media organisations, but nothing is heard in the open.

It's exactly how he's wanted it to be. And it's exactly what he went against when going all-out attack on the manager on that day.

The directive from the club is that he stepped down, but reviewing Desmond's criticism, carefully, one must question why did he permit it to get this far down the line?

If the manager is culpable of all of the accusations that Desmond is alleging he's responsible for, then it's fair to inquire why was the manager not dismissed?

He has charged him of distorting things in open forums that were inconsistent with the facts.

He says Rodgers' statements "played a part to a hostile environment around the club and fuelled hostility towards individuals of the management and the board. Some of the criticism aimed at them, and at their loved ones, has been completely unwarranted and unacceptable."

Such an remarkable charge, indeed. Legal representatives might be preparing as we discuss.

His Ambition Conflicted with the Club's Strategy Again

Looking back to better times, they were close, Dermot and Brendan. Rodgers praised the shareholder at every turn, expressed gratitude to him every chance. Brendan respected Dermot and, truly, to nobody else.

This was the figure who took the heat when his returned happened, post-Postecoglou.

This marked the most controversial hiring, the return of the prodigal son for some supporters or, as other Celtic fans would have described it, the arrival of the shameless one, who left them in the lurch for Leicester.

The shareholder had his back. Over time, Rodgers employed the persuasion, achieved the wins and the honors, and an uneasy peace with the supporters became a love-in again.

It was inevitable - always - going to be a point when his ambition clashed with the club's operational approach, however.

This occurred in his initial tenure and it happened once more, with added intensity, over the last year. He publicly commented about the sluggish process the team conducted their transfer business, the interminable waiting for targets to be landed, then missed, as was frequently the situation as far as he was believed.

Repeatedly he spoke about the necessity for what he called "agility" in the market. Supporters concurred with him.

Even when the organization splurged unprecedented sums of funds in a calendar year on the expensive Arne Engels, the £9m another player and the £6m Auston Trusty - all of whom have performed well to date, with Idah already having left - Rodgers pushed for increased resources and, often, he expressed this in public.

He set a bomb about a lack of cohesion within the team and then walked away. When asked about his remarks at his next news conference he would typically downplay it and nearly contradict what he said.

Lack of cohesion? No, no, everybody is aligned, he'd say. It looked like he was engaging in a risky game.

Earlier this year there was a report in a publication that purportedly came from a insider close to the club. It claimed that the manager was harming the team with his public outbursts and that his real motivation was managing his departure plan.

He didn't want to be there and he was arranging his exit, that was the implication of the article.

Supporters were angered. They now viewed him as similar to a martyr who might be removed on his shield because his board members did not support his vision to achieve success.

The leak was damaging, naturally, and it was meant to hurt Rodgers, which it accomplished. He called for an investigation and for the guilty person to be dismissed. If there was a examination then we heard nothing further about it.

At that point it was plain Rodgers was shedding the support of the people in charge.

The regular {gripes