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

“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.