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Just fifteen minutes after Celtic issued the news of Brendan Rodgers' surprising departure via a perfunctory five-paragraph statement, the bombshell arrived, courtesy of the major shareholder, with whiskers twitching in obvious anger.

In 551-words, major shareholder Dermot Desmond eviscerated his former ally.

This individual he convinced to join the team when Rangers were getting uppity in 2016 and needed putting in their place. And the man he again relied on after Ange Postecoglou departed to another club in the recent offseason.

So intense was the ferocity of Desmond's takedown, the jaw-dropping return of the former boss was practically an secondary note.

Twenty years after his departure from the club, and after a large part of his recent life was dedicated to an unending circuit of appearances and the playing of all his past successes at Celtic, O'Neill is back in the dugout.

Currently - and maybe for a time. Considering comments he has expressed lately, he has been keen to get another job. He will see this role as the ultimate chance, a present from the club's legacy, a return to the place where he enjoyed such success and adulation.

Would he give it up readily? You wouldn't have thought so. Celtic could possibly make a call to contact their ex-manager, but the new appointment will act as a balm for the time being.

All-out Attempt at Character Assassination

The new manager's return - however strange as it may be - can be set aside because the biggest 'wow!' development was the brutal way the shareholder wrote of the former manager.

It was a full-blooded attempt at character assassination, a labeling of him as deceitful, a perpetrator of falsehoods, a spreader of falsehoods; disruptive, deceptive and unjustifiable. "One individual's desire for self-preservation at the cost of everyone else," wrote Desmond.

For somebody who values propriety and sets high importance in dealings being done with discretion, if not outright privacy, here was a further example of how abnormal things have become at the club.

The major figure, the organization's most powerful figure, operates in the margins. The remote leader, the individual with the authority to take all the important decisions he pleases without having the obligation of justifying them in any open setting.

He never participate in team annual meetings, dispatching his son, his son, instead. He rarely, if ever, does interviews about the team unless they're glowing in nature. And even then, he's slow to speak out.

He has been known on an rare moment to support the organization with private missives to news outlets, but nothing is heard in the open.

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

The official line from the team is that he resigned, but reviewing his invective, line by line, one must question why did he allow it to get this far down the line?

If Rodgers is guilty of all of the things that the shareholder is claiming he's responsible for, then it's fair to inquire why had been the manager not dismissed?

He has charged him of distorting things in open forums that were inconsistent with reality.

He claims his statements "have contributed to a toxic atmosphere around the team and fuelled animosity towards members of the management and the board. A portion of the abuse aimed at them, and at their loved ones, has been entirely unjustified and unacceptable."

What an extraordinary charge, that is. Legal representatives might be mobilising as we speak.

'Rodgers' Aspirations Conflicted with Celtic's Strategy Again

To return to better times, they were close, Dermot and Brendan. Rodgers lauded Desmond at every turn, expressed gratitude to him every chance. Rodgers respected him and, truly, to no one other.

It was the figure who drew the criticism when Rodgers' returned happened, post-Postecoglou.

It was the most controversial appointment, the reappearance of the returning hero for some supporters or, as some other supporters would have described it, the arrival of the shameless one, who left them in the difficulty for another club.

Desmond had Rodgers' support. Over time, the manager turned on the charm, achieved the wins and the honors, and an uneasy peace with the supporters became a affectionate relationship once more.

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

It happened in his initial tenure and it transpired again, with bells on, recently. Rodgers publicly commented about the slow process the team went about their transfer business, the interminable delay for prospects to be secured, then missed, as was frequently the case as far as he was concerned.

Repeatedly he stated about the necessity for what he called "agility" in the transfer window. The fans concurred with him.

Even when the organization spent unprecedented sums of money in a calendar year on the £11m one signing, the £9m Adam Idah and the significant Auston Trusty - all of whom have cut it so far, with one already having departed - Rodgers demanded more and more and, oftentimes, he expressed this in public.

He set a controversy about a internal disunity inside the club and then walked away. Upon questioning about his remarks at his next news conference he would usually minimize it and nearly reverse what he said.

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

Earlier this year there was a report in a newspaper that allegedly came from a source associated with the organization. It said that the manager was harming Celtic with his open criticisms and that his real motivation was managing his departure plan.

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

Supporters were angered. They then saw him as akin to a martyr who might be removed on his shield because his directors wouldn't back his plans to bring success.

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

By then it was clear Rodgers was losing the support of the individuals above him.

The frequent {gripes