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Just a quarter of an hour following Celtic released the news of Brendan Rodgers' surprising resignation via a brief five-paragraph statement, the bombshell arrived, courtesy of Dermot Desmond, with whiskers twitching in apparent fury.

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

This individual he persuaded to come to the team when Rangers were getting uppity in that period and required being in their place. And the figure he once more turned to after the previous manager departed to another club in the recent offseason.

Such was the severity of Desmond's takedown, the astonishing comeback of Martin O'Neill was almost an after-thought.

Two decades after his exit from the club, and after a large part of his latter years was dedicated to an unending circuit of appearances and the performance of all his old hits at the team, Martin O'Neill is returned in the dugout.

Currently - and maybe for a while. Based on comments he has expressed lately, O'Neill has been eager to secure a new position. He will see this one as the ultimate chance, a present from the Celtic Gods, a homecoming to the environment where he experienced such glory and praise.

Will he give it up easily? You wouldn't have thought so. The club might well make a call to contact their ex-manager, but the new appointment will serve as a balm for the time being.

All-out Effort at Character Assassination

O'Neill's reappearance - however strange as it may be - can be set aside because the biggest 'wow!' development was the brutal manner the shareholder wrote of Rodgers.

This constituted a forceful endeavor at character assassination, a labeling of Rodgers as untrustful, a perpetrator of falsehoods, a disseminator of misinformation; divisive, deceptive and unjustifiable. "One individual's desire for self-interest at the cost of everyone else," wrote Desmond.

For a person who values decorum and sets high importance in dealings being conducted with discretion, if not outright privacy, here was a further example of how abnormal situations have grown at the club.

The major figure, the organization's dominant figure, operates in the background. The remote leader, the one with the authority to take all the major decisions he wants without having the obligation of justifying them in any open setting.

He does not attend club annual meetings, dispatching his offspring, Ross, in his place. He rarely, if ever, gives media talks about the team unless they're hagiographic in nature. And still, he's slow to speak out.

He has been known on an occasion or two to support the club with private missives to media organisations, but nothing is heard in the open.

It's exactly how he's preferred it to be. And that's exactly what he contradicted when going full thermonuclear on Rodgers on Monday.

The directive from the team is that Rodgers stepped down, but reading Desmond's criticism, line by line, one must question why he permit it to get this far down the line?

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

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

He claims Rodgers' statements "played a part to a toxic atmosphere around the club and fuelled hostility towards members of the executive team and the directors. Some of the criticism aimed at them, and at their loved ones, has been completely unjustified and improper."

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

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

To return to better days, they were tight, the two men. The manager 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 heat when Rodgers' comeback happened, after the previous manager.

This marked the most controversial hiring, the return of the returning hero for some supporters or, as some other Celtic fans would have put it, the return of the shameless one, who left them in the difficulty for Leicester.

Desmond had his back. Gradually, the manager employed the charm, achieved the victories 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 Rodgers' goals clashed with the club's business model, however.

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

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

Even when the organization splurged record amounts of funds in a twelve-month period on the expensive one signing, the costly another player and the £6m further acquisition - all of whom have performed well to date, with one since having departed - Rodgers demanded more and more and, often, he did it in public.

He set a controversy about a internal disunity within the team and then distanced himself. When asked about his comments at his next media briefing he would usually downplay it and nearly reverse what he stated.

Lack of cohesion? Not at all, everybody is aligned, he'd say. It appeared like he was playing a risky game.

Earlier this year there was a report in a publication that allegedly came from a source associated with the organization. It claimed that Rodgers was harming the team with his open criticisms and that his true aim was orchestrating his departure plan.

He desired not to be there and he was engineering his exit, this was the tone of the article.

Supporters were angered. They now saw him as akin to a sacrificial figure who might be removed on his honor because his directors wouldn't back his plans to bring triumph.

This disclosure was poisonous, naturally, and it was meant to hurt Rodgers, which it did. He called for an inquiry and for the guilty person to be removed. If there was a probe then we heard nothing further about it.

At that point it was clear the manager was shedding the backing of the people in charge.

The frequent {gripes