Liam Barry had a special place among the long parade of All Blacks for when he was chosen as a
22-year old for the tour of Scotland and England in 1993 he followed his father Kevin and his grandfather
Ned in wearing the silver fern. That became the first instance of a family providing three generations of All Blacks.
International career
On his first tour with the All Blacks Liam Barry became the innocent participant in a major controversy.
Coach Laurie Mains brought Mike Brewer into his squad for the latter part of the tour even though he had
been originally unavailable for business reasons and was in Britain at the time for that purpose.
When Brewer was brought in as a reserve for the international against England and especially when he took
the field as a replacement against the Barbarians in the tour finale it caused a storm of protest, especially i
n New Zealand.
This was because he had been preferred to official selections in the team in Barry and John Mitchell.
he aftermath came close to Mains being replaced as All Black coach and, in fact, one of his selection colleagues,
Peter Thorburn, was dropped for the 1994 season.Mains, apparently, believed Barry in 1993 had shown a lack
of readiness for top interantional rugby and while he went on the development tour of Argentina in 1994 he
was overlooked for the All Blacks for the next two
seasons. But at the end of the 1995 season he toured France and Italy and gained a test cap in the second
international against France.
That was the end of his All Black career, though. He was affected by injury for much of the 1996 season and
was ruled out of the tour of South Africa. At the end of that year he took up a contract in Japan, returning to
New Zealand for another NPC season with North Harbour in 2001. But after failing to win a Super 12 contract
for 2002 Barry at 31 returned for another stint in Japan.
(Wikipeadia - Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License)