By Barney Ronay, The Guardian/London

There was also a reminder this week of probably the most notable thing about Carroll, as Gary Neville, who is these days pretty much incapable of saying anything routine or uninteresting about football, analysed his performance on Sky Sports. “These are great goals. We shouldn’t be ashamed of scoring goals like that,” Neville insisted, capturing in a single slightly jarring phrase the enduring appeal in English football of this kind of spectacular aerial power, the terrible transgressive beauty of the Carroll‑shaped universe.

This is not to belittle Carroll as a footballer or to suggest that his one genuinely outstanding skill is heading the ball. But the fact is, his one genuinely outstanding skill is heading the ball. Yes, he has a thumping left‑foot shot, and knits together an attack with great craft as a traditional beacon‑style centre-forward, wheeled into place among the defensive lines like a medieval siege tower.

His overhead kick against West Brom two weeks ago remains one of the moments of the season so far, Carroll flipping himself upside down with astonishing agility like a table footballer being spun on his rod.

But when it comes to heading Carroll is astonishingly good, one of the best three headers of a ball Kevin Keegan has ever seen, stretching back to the days before heading the ball became a kind of curse, an embarrassment, an outlaw gift. Against Newcastle in January Carroll sprinted 20 yards across the centre circle to head a goal-kick off the eyebrows of the opposition centre-half and out of play on the full, a piece of majestically pointless athleticism – football as interpreted through the eyes of a rearing drizzle-soaked Highland stag – that had half the ground on its feet, one hand raised to their flushed throats.

And really it is this disorientating quality that marks him out, the unspoken fear that simply by staring at him for too long we might become too excited, too entranced by that power, those shameless goals, the buried memory of English football as an essentially aerial pursuit, a triumphant bombardment.

Which is where Neville comes in again. There is currently an argument simmering away beneath the surface of English football, stoked by the Football Association’s release last week of its glossily packed England DNA manifesto. Never mind the self-conscious oddity of this, the fact that if anything defines the DNA of English football, 140 careless years down the line, it is not really caring much about the DNA of English football (analysis reveals: we do not like analysis). The fact is Neville is the only high-profile voice to have offered a sensible counter-commentary on any of this, suggesting in a newspaper article last year – and again, obliquely, in his appreciation of Carroll’s power – that English football already has a valid tone and texture, that qualities of physicality, organisation and energy also represent a coherent identity too valuable to be junked in favour of some clips on a memory stick, buzzwords about “intelligently dominating possession” and another mimesis of the latest overseas model.

It is clear enough what the FA is up to: here, finally is an attempt to provide an actual text, some more precise idea of how exactly we are supposed to play this game, the first since the discredited long-ball gospels produced in the 1970s and 1980s by Charles Hughes, high priest of direct football who “poisoned the wells” for generations to come. And yet surely the real point is there simply is no such thing as a footballing DNA, for the English or anybody else. What is a typically English player? Steve Bloomer, the first great English striker, was a pale, skinny finisher. Jimmy Greaves was a lean and frictionless craftsman. Even Alan Shearer, before his late career habit of spending most of his time wrestling his way backwards across the halfway line with his arms stretched out, like a man reaching for the mantelpiece after a power cut, was in his pomp a wonderfully complete, natural, modern centre-forward.

The fact is there are only two types of professional footballer: good ones and better ones. The simple switch to small-sized pitches and goals is already helping to change how pre-academy kids learn to play. There is no top-down DNA here, only a first glimpse – from what I’ve seen at least – of a generation of alarmingly skilful, hearteningly tiny under-nines given a little more freedom to play as the game comes to them.

Which brings us back to Carroll who, in this light, still looks like the end of something. The fact is there will never be another all-out English target man bought or sold for such vast amounts of money. Carroll is not polyvalent. The idea of him filling in on the wing or playing as a false 9 is a nonstarter. He is instead a fixed-gear colossus and perhaps – until the next revolution – English football’s last great striking yeti, the last of the big men. We should enjoy him while we can.