🔗 Share this article

Merely a quarter of an hour following Celtic issued the announcement of their manager's surprising resignation via a perfunctory five-paragraph statement, the howitzer landed, courtesy of Dermot Desmond, with clear signs in apparent anger.

In an extensive statement, major shareholder Dermot Desmond eviscerated his old chum.

This individual he persuaded to join the club when Rangers were gaining ground in 2016 and required being in their place. And the man he once more relied on after the previous manager departed to Tottenham in the summer of 2023.

Such was the ferocity of his takedown, the jaw-dropping return of Martin O'Neill was almost 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 continuous circuit of public speaking engagements and the performance of all his past successes at the team, O'Neill is returned in the dugout.

Currently - and perhaps for a while. Based on comments he has expressed recently, he has been eager to get a new position. He will see this one as the ultimate chance, a present from the club's legacy, a return to the place where he experienced such success and adulation.

Will he give it up easily? You wouldn't have thought so. Celtic could possibly make a call to contact Postecoglou, but O'Neill will act as a soothing presence for the time being.

All-out Attempt at Reputation Destruction'

O'Neill's reappearance - as surreal as it is - can be parked because the most significant 'wow!' moment was the brutal way the shareholder wrote of Rodgers.

This constituted a full-blooded endeavor at character assassination, a labeling of Rodgers as untrustful, a perpetrator of untruths, a disseminator of falsehoods; disruptive, misleading and unacceptable. "One individual's wish for self-preservation at the cost of others," wrote Desmond.

For a person who prizes propriety and sets high importance in business being conducted with confidentiality, if not outright secrecy, this was another example of how unusual situations have grown at the club.

Desmond, the club's dominant presence, operates in the background. The absentee totem, the individual with the authority to make all the major calls he pleases without having the responsibility of justifying them in any open setting.

He never participate in team annual meetings, dispatching his son, his son, in his place. He rarely, if ever, gives media talks about Celtic unless they're hagiographic in nature. And still, he's slow to speak out.

There have been instances on an rare moment to support the club with private missives to media organisations, but nothing is made in public.

This is precisely how he's wanted it to remain. And that's exactly what he contradicted when going full thermonuclear on the manager on Monday.

The directive from the club is that Rodgers stepped down, but reviewing his criticism, line by line, you have to wonder why he permit it to reach such a critical point?

Assuming the manager is guilty of every one of the accusations that the shareholder is claiming he's responsible for, then it's fair to inquire why was the manager not removed?

Desmond has accused him of distorting things in public that did not tally with the facts.

He says Rodgers' words "played a part to a toxic environment around the team and fuelled hostility towards members of the executive team and the directors. A portion of the abuse aimed at them, and at their families, has been completely unjustified and unacceptable."

What an remarkable charge, that is. Lawyers might be mobilising as we speak.

His Ambition Clashed with the Club's Model Once More'

To return to better days, they were close, Dermot and Brendan. The manager lauded Desmond at every turn, thanked him every chance. Rodgers deferred to him and, really, to nobody else.

This was Desmond who drew the heat when his comeback occurred, after the previous manager.

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 arrival of the unapologetic figure, who left them in the lurch for another club.

The shareholder had Rodgers' support. Gradually, the manager employed the charm, achieved the victories and the trophies, and an fragile peace with the supporters turned into a affectionate relationship once more.

There was always - always - going to be a point when his ambition clashed with Celtic's operational approach, however.

This occurred in his initial tenure and it happened again, with bells on, recently. Rodgers publicly commented about the sluggish way Celtic went about their player acquisitions, the interminable waiting for targets to be landed, then not landed, as was too often the case as far as he was concerned.

Repeatedly he stated about the need for what he termed "agility" in the transfer window. Supporters concurred with him.

Even when the club spent unprecedented sums of money in a twelve-month period on the £11m Arne Engels, the costly another player and the £6m further acquisition - all of whom have cut it so far, with Idah since having departed - the manager pushed for increased resources and, oftentimes, he did it in public.

He set a bomb about a internal disunity within the club and then distanced himself. Upon questioning about his comments at his next media briefing he would usually downplay it and nearly contradict what he said.

Internal issues? No, no, all are united, he'd say. It looked like Rodgers was playing a risky game.

A few months back there was a report in a newspaper that purportedly came from a source close to the organization. It claimed that Rodgers was harming Celtic with his public outbursts and that his real motivation was orchestrating his departure plan.

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

Supporters were enraged. They then saw him as similar to a martyr who might be carried out on his shield because his directors did not support his vision to bring triumph.

The leak was poisonous, of course, and it was meant to hurt him, which it did. He called for an investigation and for the guilty person to be dismissed. If there was a probe then we heard nothing further about it.

At that point it was plain the manager was shedding the backing of the individuals in charge.

The regular {gripes