'I couldn't understand Gordon Strachan – I had to ask Celtic team-mate what he said'
Being able to understand your new manager is a pretty vital factor when moving to a new club, so one Celtic star had to have a helping hand from his team-mates
Celtic cult hero Georgios Samaras has admitted he couldn't understand Gordon Strachan's thick accent.
Strachan was in charge of the Bhoys when the 6'4" striker arrived in 2008, initially on loan from Manchester City. He'd go on to score 71 times and set up 49 goals in 242 appearances across his six-plus years stay.
But it wasn't all plain sailing for him, with one of the biggest issues he had to overcome being the Scottish tongue. Speaking exclusively to Ladbrokes Fanzone, Samaras said: "The hardest thing for me at first was just understanding the accent.
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"To be honest, in my first two weeks, I couldn't understand a lot at all. The gaffer was Gordon Strachan, so it doesn't get much more difficult than that in terms of the accent!
"I remember in the first couple of days, he kept giving me this instruction, which just sounded like 'Sammy, bull-oot, bull-oot!'. I had no idea what this 'bull-oot' meant so I just couldn't understand what he was trying to say to me.
"Anyway, in my second or third game, we get into the dressing room and, again, he said to me 'Sammy, take the ball, hold the ball, bull-oot, let's start from there'."
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Still none the wiser, the now 39-year-old had to turn to one of his new team-mates to translate the request into more simple English for him, having lived in Manchester for two years prior.
He continued: "Once the meeting had finished, I went to Gary Caldwell and just said 'Gaz, err... what the f***! What's bull-oot?!' Gaz just started laughing and explained to me that the gaffer was saying 'ball out', which made a lot more sense to me."
It was a slow process but Samaras did eventually get to grips with it thanks to a little help from another Celtic team-mate - and he's since considered himself to be an honorary Scot.
"I definitely needed some time to adapt and understand the accent, but I ended up sitting next to Scott Brown in the dressing room, so we started talking a lot," he explained.
"He was a great team-mate, by the way, a great player. Every day we would talk and talk and that helped me slowly pick up more and more words and understand the accent, and in the end I started to use them myself. So I'm a bit Scottish now."