"It was tough but I knew what the answer would be," he said. "As soon as they left around the end of January, I think I was just lying to myself.

"A lot of things go on behind closed doors that people don't see when families are together."

He added: "I'm pretty ambitious and driven and know how to separate my personal life and my professional life.

"But there will be times when I will look and say how could we have done things better?"

He admitted to having been selfish over some of the timing of his announcement but said all the stories in the press were just speculation until he made up his find for sure last week.

"I didn't know what to do, I'll be honest with you," he said. "I've never been this situation before.

"I was always going to let someone down no matter what decision I made. And I've let my club down and fans down and everybody here. That's genuinely how I feel.

" And I'm sorry, I'm very sorry about that. I'm extremely apologetic about that. It's my fault, no one else's..."

He insisted there was nothing the club could have done to change things. Bringing his family over to New Zealand permanently had not been an option because his kids were at the wrong age to switch countries, he said.

"If this club wants me back, I'll be back in a heartbeat," he said. "If my kids were younger, or older so I could kick them out, I'd be back in a heartbeat. But they're teenagers and its tough."

He insisted he believed Phoenix had a bright future still ahead and said comparisons of metrics with cities like Sydney, Melbourne or even Perth were unfair.

"We've ticked off a lot of those so called metrics," he added. "I believe we're in a much better place as a football club and as a team than others.

"it's important that we just continue this on now."

For the future, he insisted: "I haven't signed a contract with anybody, simple as that.

"I'm a professional coach. Whatever I decide to do next, my family we will be with me, and they'll be in the same house as me."