🔗 Share this article

Just fifteen minutes following Celtic released the announcement of their manager's surprising resignation via a perfunctory short communication, the howitzer arrived, from Dermot Desmond, with whiskers twitching in apparent anger.

Through 551-words, key investor Dermot Desmond eviscerated his former ally.

The man he persuaded to come to the club when their rivals were gaining ground in 2016 and needed putting back in a box. And the man he once more turned to after the previous manager left for Tottenham in the recent offseason.

So intense was the severity of Desmond's critique, the jaw-dropping comeback of Martin O'Neill was almost an after-thought.

Twenty years after his departure from the organization, and after much of his latter years was given over to an unending circuit of public speaking engagements and the performance of all his old hits at the team, Martin O'Neill is returned in the manager's seat.

Currently - and maybe for a time. Considering comments he has said recently, O'Neill has been keen to secure another job. He will see this one as the ultimate opportunity, a present from the Celtic Gods, a return to the place where he enjoyed such success and adulation.

Would he relinquish it readily? You wouldn't have thought so. The club might well reach out to contact Postecoglou, but the new appointment will serve as a balm for the time being.

'Full-blooded Attempt at Character Assassination

O'Neill's reappearance - as surreal as it may be - can be parked because the biggest shocking development was the harsh manner the shareholder wrote of the former manager.

It was a forceful endeavor at character assassination, a branding of Rodgers as deceitful, a perpetrator of untruths, a disseminator of falsehoods; disruptive, misleading and unacceptable. "A single person's desire for self-interest at the expense of others," stated he.

For somebody who prizes decorum and sets high importance in dealings being conducted with confidentiality, if not outright privacy, here was another illustration of how abnormal things have grown at the club.

The major figure, the organization's most powerful presence, moves in the margins. The remote leader, the one with the authority to make all the important decisions he wants without having the responsibility of justifying them in any public forum.

He does not attend club annual meetings, sending his son, his son, in his place. He rarely, if ever, does interviews about the team unless they're glowing in nature. And still, he's reluctant to communicate.

He has been known on an rare moment to support the organization with confidential messages to media organisations, but nothing is made in public.

It's exactly how he's preferred it to be. And it's exactly what he went against when launching full thermonuclear on the manager on Monday.

The directive from the club is that he stepped down, but reviewing his criticism, line by line, one must question why he allow it to get this far down the line?

If the manager is culpable of every one of the things that the shareholder is alleging he's guilty of, then it's fair to inquire why was the coach not removed?

He has charged him of spinning things in public that were inconsistent with reality.

He says Rodgers' words "have contributed to a toxic atmosphere around the team and encouraged hostility towards individuals of the management and the board. Some of the criticism directed at them, and at their loved ones, has been entirely unwarranted and unacceptable."

What an remarkable charge, that is. Legal representatives might be preparing as we discuss.

'Rodgers' Ambition Clashed with the Club's Strategy Again

Looking back to happier days, they were tight, the two men. Rodgers lauded the shareholder at every turn, expressed gratitude to him every chance. Brendan respected Dermot and, really, to no one other.

This was Desmond who drew the heat when Rodgers' comeback happened, post-Postecoglou.

This marked the most controversial hiring, the reappearance of the returning hero for a few or, as other supporters would have described it, the arrival of the shameless one, who departed in the difficulty for another club.

The shareholder had Rodgers' back. Gradually, Rodgers turned on the charm, delivered the victories and the honors, and an fragile peace with the fans became a love-in again.

There was always - always - going to be a point when Rodgers' goals clashed with the club's operational approach, though.

This occurred in his initial tenure and it happened once more, with added intensity, over the last year. Rodgers publicly commented about the slow way the team conducted their transfer business, the interminable waiting for prospects to be secured, then not landed, as was too often the situation as far as he was believed.

Time and again he spoke about the need for what he called "flexibility" in the transfer window. Supporters agreed with him.

Despite the club splurged unprecedented sums of money in a calendar year on the expensive one signing, the costly Adam Idah and the £6m further acquisition - all of whom have performed well so far, with Idah already having departed - Rodgers demanded more and more and, oftentimes, he expressed this in openly.

He planted a bomb about a lack of cohesion within the team and then distanced himself. Upon questioning about his comments at his subsequent media briefing he would usually downplay it and nearly contradict what he said.

Lack of cohesion? Not at all, everybody is aligned, he'd claim. It appeared like he was engaging in a dangerous strategy.

Earlier this year there was a story in a publication that allegedly came from a source associated with the organization. It claimed that the manager was harming the team with his open criticisms and that his real motivation was orchestrating his exit strategy.

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

Supporters were angered. They then viewed him as akin to a sacrificial figure who might be removed on his honor because his board members wouldn't support his vision to bring triumph.

The leak was poisonous, of course, and it was intended to harm Rodgers, which it did. He demanded for an inquiry and for the guilty person to be dismissed. If there was a examination then we learned nothing further about it.

At that point it was plain Rodgers was losing the backing of the individuals in charge.

The regular {gripes