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Just a quarter of an hour following the club released the news of Brendan Rodgers' shock resignation via a brief five-paragraph statement, the bombshell arrived, from the major shareholder, with clear signs in apparent anger.

Through 551-words, key investor Dermot Desmond savaged his old chum.

The man he convinced to come to the team when Rangers were gaining ground in 2016 and required being in their place. And the man he once more turned to after the previous manager departed to another club in the summer of 2023.

So intense was the ferocity of Desmond's critique, the astonishing comeback of Martin O'Neill was practically an secondary note.

Twenty years after his departure from the organization, 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, Martin O'Neill is back in the manager's seat.

Currently - and maybe for a time. Based on comments he has expressed lately, O'Neill has been keen to secure another job. He'll see this one as the perfect chance, a gift from the Celtic Gods, a homecoming to the environment where he experienced such glory and adulation.

Would he relinquish it readily? You wouldn't have thought so. The club could possibly make a call to sound out Postecoglou, but O'Neill will serve as a balm for the moment.

'Full-blooded Effort at Reputation Destruction'

O'Neill's reappearance - however strange as it may be - can be set aside because the most significant 'wow!' development was the brutal way the shareholder described the former manager.

It was a full-blooded attempt at character assassination, a labeling of him as deceitful, a perpetrator of falsehoods, a disseminator of misinformation; disruptive, misleading and unacceptable. "A single person's wish for self-interest at the cost of everyone else," wrote Desmond.

For somebody who prizes decorum and sets high importance in business being conducted with confidentiality, if not outright privacy, here was a further illustration of how unusual things have grown at Celtic.

The major figure, the organization's most powerful figure, moves in the margins. The remote leader, the one with the power to take all the important calls he pleases without having the obligation of explaining them in any open setting.

He does not attend team AGMs, sending his offspring, Ross, instead. He seldom, if ever, gives media talks about Celtic unless they're hagiographic in nature. And even then, he's reluctant to speak out.

He has been known on an occasion or two to defend the club with private messages to media organisations, but no statement is made in the open.

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

The directive from the club is that Rodgers resigned, but reading Desmond's criticism, carefully, you have to wonder why did he allow it to reach this far down the line?

Assuming Rodgers is guilty of every one of the accusations that the shareholder is alleging he's guilty of, then it is reasonable to inquire why had been the manager not removed?

Desmond has charged him of spinning things in public that did not tally with reality.

He says his statements "have contributed to a hostile environment around the club and fuelled hostility towards members of the management and the directors. A portion of the abuse aimed at them, and at their families, has been entirely unjustified and unacceptable."

What an extraordinary allegation, indeed. Legal representatives might be mobilising as we speak.

His Ambition Clashed with Celtic's Strategy Once More'

To return to happier days, they were close, Dermot and Brendan. Rodgers lauded Desmond at all opportunities, thanked him whenever possible. Brendan deferred to him and, truly, to no one other.

This was the figure who drew the criticism when Rodgers' comeback occurred, post-Postecoglou.

It was the most controversial appointment, the reappearance of the prodigal son for some supporters or, as other Celtic fans would have described it, the arrival of the shameless one, who departed in the lurch for Leicester.

The shareholder had his support. Gradually, the manager employed the charm, achieved the victories and the honors, and an uneasy peace with the fans became a love-in once more.

It was inevitable - always - going to be a moment when his goals came in contact with Celtic's operational approach, though.

This occurred in his initial tenure and it transpired again, with added intensity, over the last year. Rodgers spoke openly about the sluggish process Celtic went about their player acquisitions, the interminable waiting for prospects to be landed, then not landed, as was too often the situation as far as he was believed.

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

Even when the club splurged unprecedented sums of funds in a twelve-month period on the £11m Arne Engels, the £9m Adam Idah and the £6m further acquisition - all of whom have performed well to date, with Idah since having departed - Rodgers pushed for more and more and, oftentimes, he expressed this in public.

He planted a controversy about a lack of cohesion within the club and then walked away. Upon questioning about his remarks at his subsequent news conference he would usually downplay it and almost contradict what he said.

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

Earlier this year there was a story in a newspaper that purportedly originated from a source associated with the organization. It said that Rodgers was damaging Celtic with his public outbursts and that his true aim was orchestrating his departure plan.

He didn't want to be there and he was engineering his way out, this was the implication of the article.

Supporters were enraged. They then viewed him as similar to a sacrificial figure who might be removed on his shield because his board members did not support his plans to achieve triumph.

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

By then it was plain Rodgers was losing the support of the people in charge.

The frequent {gripes