Darren O’Dea drops John Kennedy Celtic exit bombshell

O’Dea, who recently admitted tapping up Adam Idea for a move to Swansea after leaving Celtic to become Swansea’s assistant manager at the start of the season, was speaking on Open Goal’s ‘Keeping the Ball on the Ground’ podcast and gave the first real insight to the behind the scenes events that led to Celtic’s season falling apart for a period with the stabilising impact of Martin O’Neill keeping things from totally collapsing.

O’Dea takes us through his understanding of events with the biggest surprise being the club making the call on John Kennedy’s position at the club and not the long serving Celtic Assistant manager. The Irishman also explains just how important a role Kennedy had at the club and believes that had he stayed the hapless Wilfried Nancy might have had a much better chance of succeeding.

As it is O’Dea has some sympathy for the Frenchman, believing Nancy walked into an absolute mess.

“I’m going to make a comment that I probably shouldn’t, I should probably keep this to myself,” Darren O’Dea stated.

“John Kennedy leaving Celtic is bigger than Brendan Rodgers leaving Celtic in terms of impact. He’s been there for 27 years. The staff there runs to his tune. Neil Lennon put a tag over him – ‘chief of staff.’ He runs the day-to-day.

“He’s obviously loyal to the manager and buys into what the manager wants, but he runs the staff, and the staff won’t have liked him leaving. That’s my opinion on it anyway,” O’Dea said.

“Nancy coming in, you weren’t just changing manager for manager. You’re having to change everything, and then you’re trying to win games. It would have been different, 100 per cent (if Nancy had kept Kennedy).

“My understanding was he wasn’t asked to stay. He was gone. That’s my understanding of it. It wasn’t a conversation. He left with Brendan.”

O’Dea was asked if Brendan Rodgers was settled at the club before O’Dea left to join Swansea last summer, and explained that he believed that Brendan planned to see out his three year contract as he had continually said that he would.

“No. I don’t know if this is factual, but my understanding was he would have left at the end of the season at the end of his contract.

“With the way he previously left the club, he certainly wanted to honour his contract.

“But a lot has obviously happened and it’s culminated in Dermot Desmond having had enough. I don’t know if Brendan went in and offered his resignation, no-one has an idea what exactly happened. Because he didn’t get sacked, he left.

“But then there’s the wipeout – John Kennedy left, Paul Tisdale eventually left after Wilfried Nancy. The amount of change is incredible.

“I listened to Nancy’s first few interviews and I thought ‘you’re not really reading the room here.’ But I felt sorry for Nancy, because he was coming in to an absolute mess.”

Watch the Keeping the Ball on the Ground, Open Goal podcast below…