How irretrievable breakdown led to savage separation for Rodgers & Celtic

Fifteen minutes after Celtic issued the news of Brendan Rodgers' shock resignation via a perfunctory five-paragraph, 134-word statement, the howitzer landed, courtesy of Dermot Desmond, with whiskers twitching in apparent fury.

In 551-words, major shareholder Desmond eviscerated his old chum.

The man he persuaded to join the club when Rangers were getting uppity in 2016 and needed putting back in a box. And the man he again turned to after Ange Postecoglou left for Tottenham in the summer of 2023.

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

Twenty years after his exit from the club, and after much of his recent life was given over to an unending circuit of public speaking engagements and the playing of all his old hits at Celtic, O'Neill is back in the dugout.

For now - and maybe for a while. Based on things he has said recently, O'Neill has been keen to get another job. He'll see this one as the ultimate, a gift from the Celtic Gods, a return to the place where he experienced such glory and adulation.

Will he give it up easily? You wouldn't have thought so. Celtic might well make a call to sound out Postecoglou, but O'Neill will serve as a balm for the moment.

O'Neill's reappearance - as surreal as it is - can be parked because the biggest Wow! moment was the brutal way Desmond wrote of Rodgers.

It was a full-blooded attempt at character assassination, a branding of Rodgers as untrustful, a perpetrator of untruths, a spreader of falsehoods; divisive, misleading and unacceptable. "One individual's desire for self-preservation at the expense of others," wrote Desmond.

For somebody who values decorum and places great store in business being done with discretion, if not outright secrecy, this was another illustration of how abnormal things have become at Celtic.

Desmond, the club's most powerful figure, moves in the margins. The absentee totem, the one with the power to make all the major calls he pleases without having the responsibility of justifying them in any public forum.

He does not attend club AGMs, sending his son, Ross, instead. He rarely, if ever, does interviews about Celtic unless they're hagiographic in tone. And even then, he's slow to communicate.

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

It's exactly how he's wanted it to be. And it's exactly what he went against when going full thermonuclear on Rodgers on Monday.

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

If Rodgers is guilty of all of the things that Desmond is claiming he's guilty of, then it's fair to ask why was the manager not removed?

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

He says his words "have contributed to a toxic atmosphere around the club and fuelled hostility towards members of the executive team and the board. Some of the abuse directed at them, and at their families, has been entirely unwarranted and unacceptable."

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

To return to happier days, they were tight, Dermot and Brendan. Rodgers lauded Desmond at every turn, thanked him every chance he got. Brendan deferred to Dermot and, really, to nobody else.

It was Desmond who drew the heat when Rodgers' returned, post-Postecoglou.

It was the most divisive appointment, the return of the prodigal son for a few or, as some other Celtic fans would have put it, the return of the shameless one, who left them in the lurch for Leicester.

Desmond had Rodgers' back. Over time, Rodgers turned on the charm, delivered the wins and the trophies, and an uneasy truce with the fans became a love-in again.

There was always - always - going to be a moment when Rodgers' ambition came in contact with Celtic's business model, though.

It happened in his first incarnation and it happened again, with bells on, over the last year. Rodgers spoke openly about the sluggish way Celtic went about their transfer business, the interminable waiting for targets to be landed, then not landed, as was too often the case as far as he was concerned.

Time and again he spoke about the need for what he called "agility" in the market. The fans agreed with him.

Even when the club splurged record amounts of money in a calendar year on the £11m Arne Engels, the £9m Adam Idah and the £6m Auston Trusty - none of whom have cut it so far, with Idah already having departed - Rodgers pushed for more and more and, oftentimes, he did it in public.

He planted a bomb about a lack of cohesion inside the club and then walked away. When asked about his comments at his next 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 looked like Rodgers was playing a dangerous game.

A few months back there was a story in a newspaper that purportedly came from a source close to the club. It said that Rodgers was damaging Celtic with his public outbursts and that his real motivation was managing his exit strategy.

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

The fans were enraged, They now saw him as akin to a martyr who might be carried out on his shield because his directors wouldn't back his vision to bring success.

The leak was poisonous, of course, and it was meant to hurt Rodgers, which it did. He called for an investigation and for the guilty person to be removed. If there was a probe then we heard no more about it.

At that point it was plain Rodgers was losing the support of the people above him.

The regular gripes about transfers were followed by a desperate beginning to the season. A feeble exit from the Champions League, flat domestic performances, a stench of decay in the air.

Blame was shifted. When Celtic lost to Dundee a few weeks back he said: "You can't be given the keys to a Honda Civic and drive it like a Ferrari."

If Rodgers had said that after losing a big Champions League game then it would have been contentious enough, but after a loss to Dundee - with a tiny fraction of Celtic's resources - it was mortifying. Later, he doubled-down on it.

The fans, increasingly growing weary of excuses, didn't buy it, but if it was a battle between Rodgers and the Celtic board then, in their eyes, Rodgers was still an emphatic winner.

Nothing was heard from Desmond, as usual, but the story of his business life tells us he doesn't appreciate his people going rogue. Rodgers comment by Rodgers comment, those Desmond whiskers would have to started to dance.

Monday, in the wake of a loss to Hearts that put Celtic eight points behind Derek McInnes' team, was the endgame. Desmond opened his laptop. Sudden, unsparing and almost startling in its intensity, he unburdened himself.

Unquestionably, elements of what Rodgers did and said was self-serving. He dropped hints that some players were being signed without his full approval, something that Desmond categorically denies.

He said as recently as Sunday that he was never more determined to fix things as he was right in the here and now, but the trust had obviously gone. In both directions.

A divorce is the wisest action. This was an irretrievable breakdown. Unseemly and embarrassing.

Rodgers made good points, though, and the supporters, though turning on him slightly in the wake of recent performances, were wholly behind him in other areas.

Some will see him now as a victim, a sacrificial lamb, a man who had the bravery to speak up about the problems the club faced and who got driven out because of it. Silenced and humiliated by Desmond.

It's an interpretation with merit, but they were two parties involved in this break-up.

Through his caustic words, Desmond has made it a vicious separation. We'll get Rodgers's riposte in time, but his era is over now. No coming back this time, not even a chance of a proper farewell. A sad, but inevitable conclusion.