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Merely a quarter of an hour following the club released the announcement of their manager's surprising departure via a brief short communication, the bombshell landed, from Dermot Desmond, with whiskers twitching in obvious fury.

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

The man he persuaded to join the team when their rivals were getting uppity in 2016 and required being in their place. Plus the figure he once more turned to after the previous manager left for another club in the recent offseason.

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

Twenty years after his exit from the organization, and after much of his latter years was given over to an continuous circuit of public speaking engagements and the performance of all his old hits at the team, O'Neill is back in the dugout.

For now - and maybe for a while. Based on comments he has said lately, he has been eager to get a new position. He'll view this one as the ultimate opportunity, a gift from the club's legacy, a return to the place where he experienced such glory and adulation.

Will he relinquish it easily? It seems unlikely. Celtic could possibly make a call to sound out Postecoglou, but the new appointment will act as a balm for the time being.

'Full-blooded Attempt at Reputation Destruction'

O'Neill's return - however strange as it may be - can be parked because the most significant 'wow!' moment was the brutal manner the shareholder described the former manager.

It was a forceful attempt at character assassination, a branding of Rodgers as deceitful, a source of falsehoods, a disseminator of falsehoods; disruptive, deceptive and unacceptable. "One individual's wish for self-preservation at the expense of everyone else," wrote he.

For somebody who prizes propriety and sets high importance in dealings being conducted with discretion, if not outright secrecy, here was another illustration of how unusual situations have grown at Celtic.

Desmond, the club's dominant presence, operates in the margins. The remote leader, the individual with the authority to make all the major decisions he pleases without having the responsibility of justifying them in any public forum.

He never attend team AGMs, sending his offspring, Ross, instead. He seldom, if ever, gives media talks about the team unless they're hagiographic in tone. And still, he's slow to speak out.

He has been known on an occasion or two to defend the organization with private messages to media organisations, but nothing is made in the open.

It's exactly how he's preferred it to remain. And it's exactly what he contradicted when going all-out attack on Rodgers on that day.

The official line from the team is that he stepped down, but reading Desmond's criticism, carefully, you have to wonder why did he permit it to reach such a critical point?

If Rodgers is guilty of all of the things that the shareholder is claiming he's guilty of, then it is reasonable to inquire why was the coach not removed?

He has accused him of spinning information in public that were inconsistent with the facts.

He claims his statements "played a part to a hostile atmosphere around the team and encouraged hostility towards members of the management and the board. Some of the criticism aimed at them, and at their loved ones, has been completely unwarranted and improper."

Such an remarkable charge, indeed. Legal representatives might be mobilising as we speak.

His Aspirations Clashed with the Club's Strategy Again

Looking back to better times, they were close, the two men. Rodgers lauded Desmond at every turn, thanked him every chance. Brendan respected Dermot and, truly, to nobody else.

This was Desmond who took the criticism when his returned happened, after the previous manager.

It was the most controversial hiring, the return of the returning hero for some supporters or, as other Celtic fans would have put it, the arrival of the unapologetic figure, who departed in the lurch for Leicester.

The shareholder had his back. Over time, the manager employed the charm, achieved the wins and the honors, and an fragile truce with the supporters became a affectionate relationship once more.

There was always - consistently - going to be a moment when Rodgers' goals came in contact with Celtic's operational approach, though.

This occurred in his initial tenure and it happened once more, with added intensity, recently. Rodgers publicly commented about the slow way Celtic conducted their player acquisitions, the endless delay for targets to be landed, then not landed, as was frequently the case as far as he was concerned.

Repeatedly he stated about the need for what he termed "flexibility" in the market. The fans concurred with him.

Even when the organization splurged unprecedented sums of funds in a twelve-month period on the expensive Arne Engels, the costly another player and the £6m Auston Trusty - all of whom have cut it so far, with Idah already having left - Rodgers pushed for more and more and, often, he did it in public.

He planted a bomb about a internal disunity inside the team and then walked away. When asked about his remarks at his next news conference he would usually downplay it and almost reverse what he said.

Internal issues? No, no, everybody is aligned, he'd say. It looked like Rodgers was playing a risky strategy.

A few months back there was a report in a newspaper that purportedly originated from a insider associated with the club. It claimed that Rodgers was harming the team with his public outbursts and that his real motivation was orchestrating his exit strategy.

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

Supporters were enraged. They now viewed him as akin to a martyr who might be carried out on his shield because his directors wouldn't back his plans to achieve triumph.

The leak was poisonous, of course, and it was meant to harm Rodgers, which it did. He called for an investigation and for the responsible individual to be removed. Whether there was a examination then we heard no more about it.

At that point it was plain the manager was losing the backing of the people above him.

The frequent {gripes