As England awaits another new dawn in the hope Thomas Tuchel has all the answers, there is just a few miles from St George’s Park a nomadic coaching guru back home wondering if anything has really changed.

Roger Spry has long since accepted his role as one of English football’s outliers.

This despite broad acknowledgement that he is a world leader in his field after an illustrious career with its roots in Rio de Janeiro in the Seventies.

It features exotic destinations and is decorated with footballing icons like Mario Zagallo, a World Cup winner with Brazil as both a player in 1958 and 1962 and manager in 1970.

Roger Spry, pictured working with Austria in 2016, has rarely been invited in by the FA

Familiar figures from the coaching world including Malcolm Allison and Sir Bobby Robson adored him. Arsene Wenger, Jose Mourinho, Fernando Santos and Carlos Quieroz all remain good friends.

And world-class players such as David Alaba and Luis Figo, who worked at length with Spry to overcome a fear of physical contact during his teenage years at Sporting Lisbon.

Spry, a black belt in karate, was ahead of his time when he devised his football-specific approach to fitness and conditioning.

His philosophy rests upon football’s dynamics having more in common with the rhythms of dance than athletics. Explosive bursts, twists and turns, changes of direction at high speed as opposed to running hard and fast in straight lines or military style physical training.

In Brazil under the tutelage of Zagallo, he seized on football’s relationship with capoeira, an acrobatic blend of martial art and dance, and brought his methods back to Europe and refined them.

John Lyall was manager of West Ham and the first in English football to hire Spry and word spread among innovative coaches of the era. Don Howe soon invited him to put on sessions at Arsenal.

He joined Ron Atkinson’s backroom staff at Sheffield Wednesday and Aston Villa and enjoyed great success in Portugal with Allison at Vitoria Setubal, with Robson at Sporting and with Santos at Porto, where their team won five successive league titles, AEK Athens and Panathinaikos.

There has always been greater acceptance of his methods overseas than on these shores, where traditionally sporting problems have been tackled by rolling up sleeves and working harder.

Zagallo liked to embrace his players. He thought it helped him understand how they were feeling. He liked to say rather than ‘work harder’ they should ‘imagine harder’.

This motto stuck with Spry. It was in tune with his martial arts training, where minds had to be sharp and bodies loose. He recalls firing mental arithmetic questions at Alaba between training exercises during his years working at the Austrian FA.

He enthuses about holistic balances. In life, between work and family, a key element of Portuguese society. In sport, finding the shifting balance between preparation, competition and recuperation.

‘It’s all about understanding that triangle,’ Spry says. ‘Any team with a disproportionate number of injuries has one of those things not working properly.’

This century, he has worked extensively in coach education, lecturing and hosting seminars for FIFA, UEFA and performing consultancies for different federations around the world.

Austria gave him a clean slate to transform fitness and conditioning in football from the top to bottom before co-hosting the Euros in 2008.

He stayed for years, his legacy inherent in their positive displays at Euro 2024, and he can still picture a 4-1 win in Sweden in 2015 when everything he ever envisaged came together. ‘Players like bursts of light all over the pitch,’ as he says.

Spry has rarely been invited to the FA’s coaching HQ at St George’s Park. There was one occasion when he was making a presentation on behalf of UEFA, he was asked to wait in the reception area while the organisers flapped around wondering where the speaker was.

They were expecting a European not an Englishman with a Brummie twang.

And this strikes to the heart of his fears, because while the internationalisation of the Premier League has brought change into the elite tier of English football, he doubts the FA has changed its culture to embrace any of these things he passionately believes in.

‘Thomas Tuchel will be interested in results, and that’s all,’ says Spry. ‘His influence on the grassroots of the English game will be zero. Deep-rooted change would mean somebody coming in to upset the apple cart and there’s still too many too comfortable with the way it is. Yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir. Do you think they’d want somebody like me walking in?’