U1: Gareth Barry, Aston Villa, Merlin’s Premier League 99 Official Sticker Collection, Transfer Update Edition

During one of my recent forays into actual social contact (we’ll see how long that lasts) my friend Stu asked me “if you were to have any player’s career, whose would you have?” Treating the question as if I were Matt Hancock responding to questions about the availability of PPE or the due date for a world-beating Track and Trace app I provided Stu with a list of players I wouldn’t want to have emulated rather than an actual answer to the question. However, unlike Matt Hancock, I now have an actual answer for Stu and that answer is Gareth Barry.

Stu’s answer was fairly straightforward: David Beckham. Beckham won everything on offer with Manchester United, won, lost and won back the hearts of the English public, became a Galactico at Real Madrid and then hit the glamour clubs of AC Milan and Paris Saint-Germain during his winter holidays from LA Galaxy. He also looked bloody good doing it. It’s very hard, and frankly quite stupid, to argue with Stu’s decision and supporting evidence but I’m going to give it a go through the medium of a far less glamorous player with a considerably less impressive CV. I blame this approach purely on years of supporting Crystal Palace.

Let’s start with the raw facts. Gareth Barry has made 653 Premier League appearances to date, 19 more than the great Ryan Giggs and 653 more than the vast majority of people in the world. Despite nearing his fortieth birthday he may yet add to this tally when West Bromwich Albion return to the top flight in September. He has earned 53 caps for England and scored 3 goals again outstripping the efforts of such luminaries as Matt Le Tissier, Lee Sharpe and Steve Guppy. Barry also etched his place in English football history by scoring his country’s 2000^th goal, albeit only after the intervention of match referee Pavel Kravolic as his header took a huge deflection off Sweden’s Daniel Majstorovic. He has also won the Premier League, FA Cup and UEFA Intertoto Cup without the aid of friendly Croatian officials.

All of that on its own would provide a decent list of reasons for someone to live out Gareth Barry’s career but they are not the main reason I have decided that he is the answer to Stu’s question. The clue is in the first statistic provided above which has seen the midfielder make over 100 appearances for each of Aston Villa, Manchester City and Everton in the top flight and sustain a professional football career for 22 years.

You might struggle to pick out an individual performance by Gareth Barry over the last two decades and therein lays the beauty of this man’s career. Although he may never have produced a moment of footballing genius that has been remembered for years to come, such as Rene Higuita’s scorpion kick or Beckham’s last minute winner against Greece, I would argue that Gareth Barry has never played such a bad game that he has lost his place in any of the teams he has played a frightening number of matches for. At his worst a solid 6/10 and at his best an admirable 8/10. What more could you ask for?

Such consistency could be seen as dull but there are few players more admired by their clubs’ fans than the reliable central midfielder. It would also be unfair to describe Gareth Barry as a one-dimensional character. During Alan Pardew’s ill-fated attempt to rescue West Brom from relegation Barry, along with fellow senior pro Jonny Evans, hijacked a taxi they had hired to get them to McDonald’s during a mid-season team bonding exercise in Barcelona and abandoned it outside the team hotel. Whilst this is hardly on a par with Arsenal’s antics in the 1990s it does at least suggest that Barry has been capable of having a laugh during his lengthy career.

I also, wrongly, assumed that this renegade streak had convinced Barcelona to sign the midfield veteran when the headline ‘Barca sign Barry’ emerged in 2019. It turns out there’s a talented youngster called Louie Barry who may well be making waves for Villa in the near future. Whatever happens young Louie could do worse than to have a similar career to his namesake. And Stu, it might be over a week late, but there’s your answer.