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Just fifteen minutes following the club issued the announcement of their manager's surprising departure via a brief short communication, the bombshell arrived, courtesy of Dermot Desmond, with whiskers twitching in obvious anger.

Through an extensive statement, key investor Dermot Desmond savaged his former ally.

The man he convinced to come to the team when Rangers were gaining ground in that period and needed putting back in a box. Plus the figure he again turned to after Ange Postecoglou left for another club in the recent offseason.

So intense was the ferocity of Desmond's critique, the jaw-dropping return of Martin O'Neill was practically an after-thought.

Two decades after his departure from the club, and after a large part of his recent life was given over to an unending series of appearances and the performance of all his past successes at the team, Martin O'Neill is back in the dugout.

Currently - and maybe for a while. Based on comments he has expressed recently, he has been eager to get a new position. He will view this one as the ultimate opportunity, a gift from the club's legacy, a homecoming to the environment where he enjoyed such success and adulation.

Would he relinquish it easily? It seems unlikely. The club could possibly reach out to sound out their ex-manager, but the new appointment will serve as a soothing presence for the time being.

All-out Effort at Character Assassination

O'Neill's return - as surreal as it is - can be set aside because the biggest shocking moment was the brutal way the shareholder wrote of Rodgers.

It was a forceful endeavor at defamation, a branding of him as deceitful, a perpetrator of untruths, a spreader of falsehoods; disruptive, misleading and unacceptable. "A single person's wish for self-preservation at the cost of everyone else," stated Desmond.

For a person who values propriety and sets high importance in business being conducted with confidentiality, if not complete secrecy, this was another example of how unusual things have become at Celtic.

Desmond, the club's dominant presence, moves in the margins. The remote leader, the individual with the authority to make all the major decisions he wants without having the responsibility of explaining them in any open setting.

He never participate in club annual meetings, sending his offspring, his son, in his place. He seldom, if ever, gives interviews about Celtic unless they're hagiographic in tone. And even then, he's slow to speak out.

He has been known on an rare moment to support the organization with confidential messages to media organisations, but no statement is made in the open.

This is precisely how he's preferred it to be. And it's just what he went against when launching full thermonuclear on Rodgers on that day.

The directive from the team is that Rodgers resigned, but reading Desmond's invective, carefully, you have to wonder why he allow it to reach such a critical point?

Assuming Rodgers is guilty of all of the accusations that Desmond is alleging he's responsible for, then it's fair to inquire why was the coach not removed?

He has charged him of distorting things in open forums that did not tally with the facts.

He claims his words "have contributed to a hostile environment around the team and fuelled animosity towards members of the executive team and the directors. A portion of the abuse directed at them, and at their families, has been completely unwarranted and improper."

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

'Rodgers' Aspirations Conflicted with the Club's Model Again

To return to better days, they were tight, Dermot and Brendan. Rodgers lauded the shareholder at all opportunities, expressed gratitude to him every chance. Brendan deferred to Dermot and, truly, to nobody else.

This was Desmond who drew the criticism when Rodgers' returned happened, post-Postecoglou.

This marked the most controversial hiring, the reappearance of the prodigal son for some supporters or, as some other supporters would have put it, the return of the unapologetic figure, who departed in the lurch for Leicester.

The shareholder had Rodgers' support. Over time, the manager turned on the charm, achieved the wins and the honors, and an fragile truce with the fans turned into a love-in once more.

There was always - consistently - going to be a moment when his goals came in contact with Celtic's business model, though.

It happened in his first incarnation and it transpired again, with bells on, recently. He publicly commented about the sluggish way Celtic went about their transfer business, the endless waiting for prospects to be landed, then missed, as was too often the situation as far as he was believed.

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

Despite the club splurged record amounts of money in a twelve-month period on the £11m Arne Engels, the costly another player and the £6m Auston Trusty - none of whom have cut it so far, with Idah since having departed - the manager pushed for increased resources and, often, he expressed this in openly.

He set a bomb about a lack of cohesion within the team and then distanced himself. Upon questioning about his comments at his subsequent news conference he would usually downplay it and nearly reverse what he said.

Internal issues? Not at all, all are united, he'd claim. It appeared like Rodgers was engaging in a dangerous strategy.

Earlier this year there was a story in a publication that allegedly originated from a insider close to the club. It claimed that the manager was damaging the team with his public outbursts and that his true aim was managing his exit strategy.

He didn't want to be there and he was engineering his exit, this was the tone of the article.

Supporters were angered. They now viewed him as akin to a martyr who might be carried out on his shield because his directors did not support his vision to achieve triumph.

This disclosure was poisonous, of course, and it was intended to hurt Rodgers, which it did. He demanded for an inquiry and for the guilty person to be dismissed. If there was a probe then we learned no more about it.

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

The frequent {gripes