JOSH Mansour has opened up on the secret anger he held towards Kangaroos teammate Josh Dugan for his part in a horror training accident in 2016.

Mansour ruptured his anterior cruciate ligament while on tour with the Australian squad for the Four Nations in England. The injury sidelined him until midway through last season, cruelling his State of Origin selection chances.

It was towards the end of a training drill that the incident happened.

Mansour, on the defending side of an opposed field session, was ushering a Cameron Smith grubber over the dead ball line when his opposing winger — Dugan — chased it through.

But instead of collecting the ball Dugan collected the leg of teammate Mansour, bending his knee and snapping the ligament inside.

On reflection, Mansour admits it was the lowest point of his NRL career.

Watch every NRL premiership game live in 2018 on Fox Sports. Sign up here to stream for free on a two week trial >

And he told 20FOUR’s The Stack Report he was secretly angry at Dugan in the days following the accident.

“Yeah I was. I’m not going to lie, I was,” Mansour said.

“But then I didn’t want to have that mindset, I didn’t want to point the finger at him because he wasn’t trying to injure me.

“He was rattled, he was pretty rattled.

“You do hold that bit of anger towards the person because he did contribute to the injury.

“But I didn’t want to think like that because Josh is a great fella.”

It was a shocking end to an otherwise fruitful year for Mansour.

Raiders head of recruitment Peter Mulholland joins Nathan Ryan and Ben Glover to delve into the club’s roster strategy, salary cap issues and Josh Hodgson solutions in a podcast that wraps up the NRL off-season.

You can also subscribe via iTunes or for Android users, listen on the iPP Podcast Player app.

The Penrith winger had made his State of Origin debut with NSW, been called up to the Australian team for the Four Nations, and celebrated his wedding in between.

It was the phone call to his new wife from his hotel room on the other side of the world that proved the hardest thing for Mansour in the immediate aftermath of his injury.

“That was tough. It was awful,” he said.

“I was speaking to her normally on the phone and 10 minutes in I still hadn’t said anything.

“I said ‘listen babe, I’ve got something to tell you. I got injured at training and did my ACL’.

“She didn’t understand the full extent of it at the time, but when she saw the footage it started to sink in.”

Dane Gagai and Josh Mansour of the Kangaroos training during the World Cup. Source: AAP

Since returning to the field midway through 2017 Mansour has been on the upswing.

He missed the Origin series but managed to get picked in the Kangaroos squad again, and played two World Cup games for the eventual winners.

Now he has his sights set on a return to the Blues side.

If he can carry his 2017 form into the early rounds of the season, new Blues coach Brad Fittler will surely come calling.