Welcome back, then, Steven Gerrard. For all the Premier League's enduring celebrity tinnitus, the parping flatulence of its star fixation, the return of Liverpool's captain has been relatively soft-pedalled. Gerrard, who has been suffering from groin‑related maladies, will play against Manchester United on Saturday, his first start since March. And, for once, the rather flaccid fanfare has offered an opportunity to put out a flag or two of one's own.

If Gerrard's return has an added veneer of fascination it is perhaps because at the age of 31 and in the final third of a fine career he still carries with him a sense of trapped energy, of rawness and raggedy-edged vitality. Gerrard is in some ways a strange player: hugely effective, but also out of kilter with the times, a kind of period piece footballer, a heritage exhibit from English football's rootsy golden age.

Most high-end modern midfielders (and Gerrard is still, in essence, a midfielder) will seek to control the rhythm of a match and wait for the moment to produce the gleaming scalpel. With Gerrard there is rarely a real sense of rhythm at all, but if there is it is a speed-metal guitar detonation, a burp of raw noise. His game is based around the production of explosive moments: a defibrillating penalty area surge, an unanswerable top-corner spank, conjured not from ambient pressure or staged manoeuvrings but often produced out of nothing, without context of warning.

It is an unusually fraught interpretation of what football is meant to be. Top players are often said to have "a picture in their head", but Gerrard seems to have something closer to a series of disturbing visions – and so he hurtles about the place in a froth of wild possibility, snuffing candles, steadying ladders, plumping cushions, turning off the oven with his big toe.

It is a compelling urgency and a quality of haste that can make you forget how peerlessly thrilling those explosions can be. How many players of the past 20 years – Matt Le Tissier, Lionel Messi, Zlatan Ibrahimjustgoingtodozeoffforabit – have a more spectacular YouTube showreel?

Mainly, though, his urgency conveys passion: an easily mocked intangible, but a quality that, like booze at a wedding, remains an essential base note, and which is also hugely persuasive.

I'm thinking not just of his loyalty to Liverpool, but even that unfortunate scuffle with a nightclub DJ, the enduring image of which was of a man capable of feeling such passion for the music of Phil Collins that he will fight for the right to hear it. As the story died away who among us wasn't inspired to search uneasily our own feelings for Collins's stylings, to reconsider in private the unusually crisp production values, the husky power of the vocals, all the while seeking a similar twitch of electricity – albeit perhaps detecting not so much grand passion as a mechanised quality best defined as the sound of a middle-aged man whining about his ex-wife through a synthesiser while behind him a robot plays a white plastic saxophone.

There is another strand to Gerrard's return and, as ever, it involves England. Wayne Rooney's ban at Euro 2012 leaves a vacancy for a schemer, a ferret in the hole, a role Gerrard has filled with success for Liverpool, albeit bunging him in there with a generalised remit to explode still feels like a shrugging of the shoulders, a bit like finally giving up on that multilevered chrome artichoke peeler wedding present and just using it as a particularly fancy doorstop.

This is the lingering frustration of Gerrard's career. With England there is still a feeling he has been employed in positions that restrict rather than nurture. At other times he has been jostled into a role at odds with the guarded rhythms of international football, billed as a payload, a warhead, a dynamite toting insurgent. They can't live with him, we shriek, as Gerrard bombs forward zanily, but really it is us who have dealt poorly with a player who has been allowed only to half-flower with England. Rewind a decade and I believe Gerrard could have developed into a peerless midfield anchor. His performance in that role in the 5-1 defeat of Germany in Munich was a high watermark – breathtaking mobility, great ball-winning grab in those legs, his passing zingingly precise. But then, this is England where the blood is forever up, combustion is prized above all and a player with such obvious gifts must be urged upfield to "hurt" the opposition in only the most furiously literal sense of the word.

Rooney-less in their forthcoming group stage struggles, England will no doubt come calling again with the promise of that central creative role and the chance of a defining late-career international surge, balancing out like twin ends of a barbell the greatness of his first third at Liverpool. But for Gerrard the horizons have perhaps narrowed and the immediate questions are more basic: can he still explode? Will the moments still flow? It is heartening just to see him back walking out at Anfield for the kind of game – Premier League explosion-ball with all its familiar thrills – to which his talents are perfectly suited. Gerrard has been the most engrossing of English footballers and we should enjoy him while we can.