Immaculate Brendan Rodgers plus Rangers being a proper club again tees up prospect beyond tantalising – Keith Jackson

Let's be honest, it felt like the season that refused to die.

Even in its final gasps on Tuesday night, an almighty rain storm of biblical proportions ensured that it hung in there at a squelchy Hampden for an hour and a half more than it ought to have done. But now that it’s finally resting in peace and the summer can properly begin, the start of the next one simply can’t come quickly enough.

All of the pieces could hardly have been more perfectly put in place. The prospect of what is about to come is actually way beyond tantalising. The immaculate Brendan Rodgers is back at Celtic’s seat of command while his former apprentice, Michael Beale, has had six months to get his feet under the table on the other side of Glasgow’s divide.

As a matter of fact, Rangers appear to be shaping up as a proper football club again, perhaps for the first time since Craig Whyte’s pointy, buckled plastic shoes first shuffled over the front door more than a decade ago.

With recently appointed chairman John Bennett driving fundamental – and much needed – structural changes behind the scenes, the Ibrox outfit might finally ready to compete on a level playing field with a rival which has been ruling the roost with relentless intensity ever since Rodgers appeared on the scene, seven years ago, for his first stint in charge.

Yes, Beale and Steven Gerrard may have interrupted this dominance by torpedoing Celtic’s quest for 10 in a row but, in retrospect, that title win was merely a temporary blip in a long-term graph of complete and utter domestic superiority. The truth is, Rangers have been riddled with internal rancour and a deeply rooted sense of paranoia but now that the insufferably cantankerous Douglas Park has been ousted from power, there