Sam Allardyce is in line to land the biggest job of his football career - but he owes it all to a parish priest in Limerick.
Big Sam looks likely to be the new England manager after his club Sunderland confirmed he had permission to hold talks with the Football Association.
It is a world apart from the start of his management career in 1991 at Limerick FC, when he bought into a priest with a wild dream.
Limerick boasted a priest for a chairman - Fr Joe Young - and had a transfer kitty raised by shaking a tin around pubs.
Allardyce knew little of the Irish football scene, and Fr Young knew little of Allardyce, only that he coached at West Brom, who the priest supported as a child.
He had been sacked when assistant manager at West Brom two years earlier, and had been waiting for an opportunity to restart his coaching career.
Fr Young phoned and offered him the opportunity to take over at Limerick - which Allardyce initially dismissed as a prank.
A persistent Fr Young finally convinced Allardyce to come to Limerick.
Allardyce recalls turning up to witness Limerick's set-up, which included only a pitch, one shower and a burnt out bar.
Fr Young told him: "We all have to start somewhere."
In his autobiography, Allardyce revealed he thought it was a joke when he was offered the player-boss job at Limerick.
"The phone rang one evening. `Hello Sam, it's Fr Joe Young here'. `P*** off', I said, and put the receiver down. I couldn't be bothered with any prank calls, I wasn't in the mood," he wrote.
"The phone went again and the voice protested: `Sam, please, I really am Fr Joe Young and I'm the chairman of Limerick. We wonder if you'd be interested in becoming player-manager of our club. What did I have to lose?
"Joe was the head of the local parish and his church was just round the corner in the poorest area of Limerick. The fans may have been small in number but they were a passionate lot who crowded into the social club afterwards which was the lifeblood of Limerick, where takings at the bar kept the team going."
Allardyce recalled that the club had a nice set-up at Limerick University with an office and training pitch.
"That didn't last long as we couldn't pay the rent, so we really were Raggy-Arsed Rovers and the future looked grim. We won the league by about 16 points but we knew we wouldn't survive in the Premier Division. The club might even go bust before that."
Fr Young previously pointed to the continual fundraising slog as Allardyce's reason for leaving.
At the last game of the season, Allardyce looked at the crowd - about 1,500 - and he knew the club was still going to be begging and borrowing to keep going.
He left after just one season, having won the second tier title and promotion.
He steered Sunderland to Premier League survival last season and has achieved notable results with Bolton, West Ham and Sunderland.
There is no set number of candidates or date by which England must make an appointment, while the FA is understood not to have ruled out an interim appointment for September's World Cup qualifier with Slovakia.
The 61-year-old was originally interviewed for the role in 2006, only to be overlooked in favour of Steve McClaren.
