'Rodgers & Celtic bring board relief but fan unrest remains'

For a man supposedly trying to engineer his way out of Celtic - according to a mystery mole - Brendan Rodgers gave a pretty convincing performance of a deeply invested manager in the dying seconds of a slow burner at Rugby Park.

When Kelechi Iheanacho banged in the penalty that broke the considerable spirit of the home team, Rodgers turned away, beaming. Relieved, for sure. Delighted, no doubt. This has been a rough week for the Celtic manager but a tumultuous few days ended with a smile in the teeming rain of Kilmarnock.

Killie will rage about the game-defining penalty and you can see why. A ricochet on to an arm from a few yards away. It seemed brutally unfair. Stuart Kettlewell spoke later about Scottish FA guidance pre-season that suggested such an incident was no longer deemed a penalty.

Whistling in the end. It didn't matter. He walked away at the end, possibly wondering what else he could do for a living apart from the head-wrecking, soul-destroying world of football management.

Before things got under way, Rodgers was asked about his thermonuclear chat of Friday - leak-gate and all of that.

He was asked if the club could unite itself again. Rodgers dodged the question and replied that his job was to unite the football on the pitch. That was his gig. That was all he could control.

For an hour you wondered if he was even in control of that anymore. For all the justifiable criticism of Celtic's direction of travel as a football club, for all the accusations from fans about the board falling asleep at the wheel, for all of Rodgers pointing fingers at unnamed people in his midst, this was a stodgy performance from his team. Again.

The one bright attacking spark was his new winger Sebastian Tounekti, who seemed to be operating on a different level to everybody else out there. He had a dynamism that nobody else had. He was going past players, inside and out, and carried a threat and an ambition every time he got on the ball.

Later, Rodgers said that Tounekti was a joy and the type of player that Celtic have been crying out for and it was hard to disagree.

Here he was with his energy, pace and appetite for work on a dismally wet day on Kilmarnock's artificial surface. Settings don't come much more challenging than this for a newcomer.

But he was a man alone for Celtic for the longest time. Just as the away end were cranking up the invective, just as the chants grew darker and a new banner slamming the board was raised, Celtic scored.

Almost an hour of huff and puff, the first 12 minutes played out with half the visiting fans hanging out in the concourse as part of their day of protest, and now the mood lifted among the Celtic fans.

No more chants of 'sack the board' and no more words advising absent chairman Peter Lawwell what he can do with himself. There was euphoria at finally breaking Killie down - among the fans, among the board, wherever they were, and in the mind of Rodgers, too.

Seconds before Marcelo Saracchi swung in a cross that Daizen Maeda headed home, Rodgers had whistled to his substitutes to get ready. He'd had enough of Celtic's passive stuff, enough of Michel-Ange Balikwisha as bystander, enough of Saracchi offering little in attack; too much inaccuracy in possession and too much, too, of Maeda, who had drifted through the game.

Tounekti was excellent but still the stalemate held. That it was Maeda who broke it was a twist in his tale. One second he was coming off, a player clearly diminished by not getting the move away from Scotland that he wanted and that his manager has spoken about.

The next second he was the hero, albeit a temporary one. Killie came thundering back and levelled it and immediately the eyes turned, yes, to the delirious home fans, but also the ones standing in silence down the far end.

David Watson thumped in his header with seven minutes left to play and it wasn't just the reaction from Killie fans that was noticeable, it was the relative silence among Celtic folk that suggested something grim was stirring.

And it probably would have, had the penalty not gone their way. If you'd been told beforehand that the elements among the Celtic support would have to be held back by stewards in order to halt a pitch invasion then you might have had some thoughts about vitriol being directed at the men they want out of their club.

Instead, the emotion was of an altogether different kind and it was ironic, too. So much of the debate around Celtic has been around their hapless inability to replace Kyogo Furuhashi and Adam Idah up front.

Iheanacho's arrival went down badly, but his first significant act was greeted with untrammelled jubilation. For a player who has had his travails in recent times, it took some guts to seize the moment in the way he did, right in front of the Celtic fans who would have doubted him and in the last seconds of a testing day.

The under-fire Celtic board will hope that a series of wins will reduce the pressure on them, that a widening gap between them and Rangers - now a mighty nine points - will calm things down over time. Maybe. Another 'sack the board' went up at the end, a little half hearted, perhaps, but a reminder that the anger has not subsided.

The true examination of that will come in the weeks and months ahead. Nothing can have changed in the way they view the people who run their club, so expect more heat on an unpopular board and more of the suits hunkering down and hoping that it blows over in a wave of victories.

Sunday was about survival and they just about managed it. In Rodgers the fans still trust, that's clear. And in Tounekti they may have found the successor to the wingers who lit it up for them in better days.