The real reason why Americans don’t get football is because they expect a team sport to showcase a superstar. The sport that Americans call football is a vehicle for the quarterback, every baseball game is won or lost by the pitcher and basketball, with only six men from one team on court, has naturally developed into a pattern of team superstar and his helpers.

A single man can do far less in what we call a football team, Americans a soccer team. The sport is simply not structured to produce instant leaders; every player must, to an extent, take decisions, be a boss. The football superstar simply doesn’t get the opportunity to do everything, as a Michael Jordan or a Joe Montana does.

One man can still dominate a team in football, but it is a much harder trick to pull off. You can find one in every game ever played in the American sports, but it is a much rarer thing in football. In football, one man can never do everything, but instead, he can be everyone. He can make every player on his team play with added power, added purpose, added courage. He can, in short, inspire.

It is the greatest of the gifts given to all of the players we traditionally consider truly great: Pelé, Maradona, Beckenbauer, Cruyff, Zidane. But at club level, no one has produced that ability more often and to such devastating effect as Steven Gerrard. Now, two years after giving the performance of a lifetime, he was out there trying to do it all over again.

He started high up the pitch, playing behind Dirk Kuyt, the lone forward, at times foraging in midfield, at others an extra forward. There he was, looping in an almost devastating far-post cross as the game began; there he was making a dramatic run into the area; there he was hoofing the ball clear from a corner.

Play all ten outfield positions at once, Steve. You mean, I can’t make saves as well? Like Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army, Gerrard will always volunteer to be that man who takes on any task. And last night, as always, he demonstrated that his greatest asset is his sense of emotion.

With Gerrard, you never talk about the sublime touch, or the trick, or the beauty. Instead, you talk about things like hearts and souls. Gerrard handles his footballing emotions with skill and, like a method actor, he can only do so by believing in them utterly. With Gerrard, it only works because it is genuine.

It was this Brando-esque power of emotion that took Liverpool to their quite extraordinary victory over the same opponents, AC Milan, in the Champions League final of 2005. And last night, he set out to do the whole thing over again, and took it on as if it were the most natural thing in the world. He was loving it. Some womanisers fall in love with every woman they have a fancy for; it is a gift.

Well, Gerrard has the same gift for a total emotional involvement in any game of football he plays for Liverpool. Last night, a thundering tackle, a charge through defence, a whipped pass – a hearts-on-sleeve footballer who was besotted with the task at hand. Compare and contrast with Kaká, AC Milan’s playmaker.

Infinitely more subtle, more thoughtful, a man of rapier-passes and darting little runs. He is the intellectual to Gerrard’s man of feeling, a passer and a prompter. He is not a man who seeks to be every man on the pitch, nor could he succeed in doing so.

But he turned the match just the same, a run, a turn, a skilled holding of the ball, and when Xabi Alonso fouled him, he went down smiling. Filippo Inzaghi put the ball into the net with a semi-voluntary deflection from the free kick, and suddenly Liverpool had to do it the hard way again.

It was a three-goal deficit that Gerrard overcame two years ago – surely coming back from a single goal would be easy. Besides, Liverpool had been having the best of it until the goal. The Force is strong with this one, as they said in Star Wars. Gerrard took on the job of outing the Force behind Liverpool, as he did so famously in Instanbul.

And a fabulous surge into the box, the man seizing the moment with the Force behind him, but, forced wide, he failed to beat the goalkeeper from a narrow angle. The world seemed to have turned against him, to be saying you’ve worked your share of miracles, now try a taste of being ordinary.

Wrong man to tell; there he was, cropping up on the right, swift interplay with Jermaine Pennant and then sending in a raking cross. Not today, thanks. A long-range shot, never cleanly struck. The emotion was shifting towards desperation, and that’s a hard thing to control even for the Marlon Brando of football.

Liverpool threw men forward, brought on the subs, sought to change their luck, Gerrard forever driving them on. Milan played it Italian-clever, tight and cruel and smart, trumping Gerrard’s ace. Kaká’s brilliant pass, Inzaghi’s second goal.

Yesterday’s scheduled miracle failed to take place.