WORLD CUP 2010:STUDENTS OF imbalance will know that at no point in the 1-1 draw with America was there more than one left-footed player on the field in an England shirt. Of the 14 used in Rustenburg on Saturday night only Ashley Cole would not favour his right boot.

Gareth Barry is back to right the ship and stopping all England’s possessions hurtling over to one side of the vessel is not the smallest of his potential contributions as he completes a final week of training before returning to Fabio Capello’s plans for Friday’s Group C game against Algeria. In his wilderness years, under Sven-Goran Eriksson, there appeared no prospect of this Sussex yeoman performing so many vital functions in the national side.

The first is that Barry provides midfield defensive ballast in a squad denuded of Owen Hargreaves, their best screening player from 2006. Four years before the Germany World Cup, Pele was asked for his player of the tournament up to the quarter-final stage and answered, after a long pause: “Boot”. Silence. Confusion. Then Pele made clear he was referring to Nicky Butt of Manchester United and England.

Now the chance drops to a City player to provide the security Capello has always sought to liberate his three match winners: Wayne Rooney, Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard.

Barry’s absence against the USA twisted England out of shape. It forced the restoration of a central midfield partnership that gets England fans humming “you say potato, I say pot-artoe, let’s call the whole thing off”.

No England manager has been able to make a double piston of the Gerrard-Lampard alliance, so that one attacks while the other exercises restraint. Should I stay or should I go has become an existential question too great for the England midfield to bear, so Capello is bound to restore Barry as soon as he believes he is physically able to unshackle the team’s two best raiders.

The six-week prognosis on Barry’s ankle injury when he hurt it against Spurs on May 5th again obliged Capello to break his rule on carrying injured players but was less of a gamble than the selection of Ledley King, who lasted 45 minutes of this campaign.

Capello’s reasoning was that once Barry was sound there would be time in training and the group stage to bring him back to his metronomic best.

“It was tough. I think straight away, once I heard the news it could be six weeks, it was important mentally that I never gave up,” Barry said. “They said it was going to be tough to make the initial squad but I was hopeful that the management staff here would give me a chance.

“The medical staff at Manchester City were brilliant. It wasn’t their main target for me to get to the World Cup but they were brilliant.

“They said they would set me up with an oxygen tent at home to sleep in. That was pretty tough, to be honest, to get used to. We had a few hot days at the time and it was difficult to sleep in because of the heat. All these things and the treatment they gave me got me ahead of where I should’ve been. All the time, going to the World Cup was the burning desire.”

Barry says his ankle has “been fine for 10 days”. “If the manager had asked me if I was ready to play against the United States at the weekend, I would have bitten his hand off to try and make the starting team.”

In that match Gerrard and Lampard toiled for an hour between two right-footed wingers, Aaron Lennon and Shaun Wright-Phillips, without the defensive cover that would have allowed them frequently to join Rooney and Emile Heskey.

Capello’s options with Barry back in the blend will be to shift Gerrard back over to the left and allow him more attacking licence or discard Heskey and push the captain up the field to play behind Rooney: a panacea, to some observers, but not one Capello has shown much sign of reaching for.

The attendant fear is that Barry, like so many England regulars in recent years, has been pushed through an accelerated recovery that will leave either his ankle or some other joint or muscle susceptible to new damage.

Capello had a double dose of good news yesterday as Wayne Rooney and Ashley Cole returned to training.

The pair missed Mondays session, Cole to do rehabilitation work on old injuries and Rooney with an ankle knock he picked up in the opening World Cup draw against the USA. The one absentee was King.

• Guardian Service