Kane, Ronaldo and 16,000 throw-ins: how Barry became Tuchel's No 2

Former Accrington player turned England coach has worked obsessively to reach his status with national team

- Ben Fisher

He is the type of person who will sit in a room and watch 5,000 throw-ins," John Coleman says of the England assistant head coach, Anthony Barry - but, if anything, he is selling his former Accrington Stanley player short. Barry once sifted through 60 hours of footage to analyse all 16,154 throw-ins from the 2018-19 Premier League season, in the name of research for his pro licence dissertation: the undervalued set piece.

His studies earned him top marks, his work was published as an academic paper and he impressed Frank Lampard, a classmate on the Football Association course, so much that he asked Barry to join his backroom staff at Chelsea in 2020.

Rewind three years and there was a natural scepticism when the Wigan manager, Paul Cook, a player-coach at Accrington when Coleman first signed a teenage Barry in 2005, wanted to make the Liverpudlian his first-team coach. At that point, Barry had recently retired aged 30, most of his playing career in non-league, and his only coaching experience was a voluntary role with Accrington's under-16s.

"We couldn't get any references on him," the former Wigan chairman David Sharpe says. "So we met him, he came to the training ground and within a minute we warmed to his infectious character. Paul was raving about him: 'He is going to be the real deal.' But we very much just went off his character, because we hadn't seen any of his sessions."

Some of the biggest names in the game are on the receiving end this week and it has been this way for a while. He has coached many of the most decorated players: Cristiano Ronaldo, Kevin De Bruyne, Thiago Silva.

Barry spent three years at Chelsea, where he first worked with Thomas Tuchel, and also embarked on a part-time role with the Republic of Ireland. Then Roberto Martinez invited Barry to join his Belgium staff and they also worked together with Portugal.