While England expects another new dawn in the hope of Thomas Tuchel has all the answers, just a few miles from the San Jorge Park, a nomadic training guru at home, wondering if something really has changed.
Roger Spry has long accepted his role as one of the atypical values of English football.
This despite the broad recognition that he is a world leader in his field after an illustrious career with his roots in Rio de Janeiro in the seventies.
Our conversation about coffee in its barn converted near Lichfield, where the 74 -year -old man is recovering from a cancer operation, explores his remarkable personal adventure.
It has exotic destinations and is decorated with football icons such as Mario Zagallo, a World Cup winner with Brazil as a player in 1958 and 1962 and manager in 1970.
Roger Spry, in the photo working with Austria in 2016, has rarely been invited by the FA
Family figures from the world of coaches, including Malcolm Allison and Sir Bobby Robson, worshiped him. Tersene Wenger, José Mourinho, Fernando Santos and Carlos I want to be good friends.
And world -class players like David Alaba and Luis Figo, who worked extensively with Spry to overcome fear of physical contact during his adolescence in Sporting Lisbon.
Spry, a black belt in Karate, was ahead of his time when he devised his specific soccer approach for physical condition and conditioning.
His philosophy is based on the dynamics of football that has more in common with the rhythms of dance than athletics. Explosive explosions, turns and turns, changes of direction at high speed instead of running hard and fast in straight lines or military -style physical training.
In Brazil, under the tutelage of Zagallo, he seized the relationship of football with Capoeira, an acrobatic mixture of martial art and dance, and brought his methods to Europe and refined them.
John Lyall was a manager of West Ham and the first in English football to hire Spry and Word dissolved among the innovative trainers of the time. Don Howe soon invited him to put sessions at Arsenal.
He joined the staff of Ron Atkinson's backing in Sheffield Wednesday and Aston Villa and enjoyed great success in Portugal with Allison in Vitoria Setubal, with Robson in Sporting and with Santos in Porto, where his team won five successive league titles, Aek Athens and Panathinaikos.
There has always been a greater acceptance of their methods abroad than in these coasts, where sports problems have traditionally been addressed by rolling sleeves and working harder.
Zagallo liked to hug his players. He thought he helped him understand how they felt. He liked to say instead of 'working harder', they should 'imagine harder'.
This motto stayed with Spry. He was in tune with his martial arts training, where minds had to be sharp and loose. Remember to shoot mental arithmetic questions in Alaba among training exercises during their years working in the Austrian FA.
He gets excited about holistic balances. In life, between work and family, a key element of Portuguese society. In sport, find the changing balance between preparation, competition and recovery.
“It's about understanding that triangle,” says Spry. “Any team with a disproportionate number of injuries has one of those things that do not work properly.”
This century has worked widely in the education of coaches, conferences and organizing seminars for FIFA, UEFA and completion consultations for different federations worldwide.
Austria gave him a clean slate to transform physical aptitude and conditioning in football from top to bottom before being organization of euros in 2008.
He stayed for years, his inherent legacy of his positive exhibitions in the 2024 Eurocup, and can still imagine a 4-1 victory in Sweden in 2015 when everything he once anticipates joined. “Players like light explosions throughout the field,” as he says.
Spry has rarely been invited to the FA training headquarters in ST George's Park. There was an occasion when he was making a presentation on behalf of the UEFA, he was asked to wait in the reception area while the organizers fell wondering where the speaker was.
They expected a European, not an English with a Brummie.
And this reaches the heart of his fears, because although the internationalization of the Premier League has brought the change to the level of English football, he doubts that the FA has changed its culture to embrace any of these things in which it believes passionately.
“Thomas Tuchel will be interested in the results, and that's,” says Spry. 'His influence on the base of the English game will be zero. The deeply rooted change would mean that someone entered to alter the Apple cart and there are still too comfortable with the way it is. Yes, Lord, no sir, three full bags, Lord. Do you think they would want someone like me to enter?