Celtic manager favourite Ange Postecoglou has revealed how a car crash TV interview nearly ended his managerial career before it begun.
Before he took the venture into senior management, the 55-year-old was in charge of Australia's Under 20s for seven years in the early 2000s.
It was a role that helped him cut his teeth in management and he learned some hard lessons on the way to being lined up as Neil Lennon' s successor.
After Australia's kids failed to qualify for a youth World Cup, Postecoglou was involved in an infamous TV interview bust-up with pundit Craig Foster about the poor campaign.
It degenerated into a shouting match in an infamous interview in 2007 that is viewed as one of the most iconic moments in Australian sporting TV history.
And later, Postecoglou - who is the clear favourite for the Celtic job after the collapse of Eddie Howe 's move - admitted he was unemployable after the bust-up and eventually went to Greece to manage Panachaiki for a year.
He said: "I just didn’t feel it was necessary, didn’t feel it was productive. I knew that interview wasn’t going to go well because we just failed to qualify for both the World Cups, our first time in Asia and my reasoning for doing it was trying to explain to people what was coming.
"Being in Asia we weren’t going to be able to roll up to qualifying tournaments like we did in Oceania.
"The accountability already stood with me, but what it did do, it did make me unemployable. I couldn’t even get an assistant coaching role.
"It was the reason I went to Greece for a year because I wasn’t going to let Australian football stop me from my ambitions as a coach.
"It was disheartening because I just felt everything I had done with South Melbourne as a manager had been forgotten.
"As all things with life we take our knocks and move on, and it's safe to say it didn’t hold me back for too long."
Meanwhile, the former Australia boss has revealed how arriving Down Under as a migrant from Greece as a five-year-old made him proud of his parents.
Postecoglou arrived by boat in Melbourne in 1970 after father Jim lost his business following the 1967 Greek military coup.
He later said: "As an adult, I realised the sacrifices my parents made and why they made them.
"But as a kid I just wanted to fit in and the best way to fit in was sport."
