Why I Fucking Love Charlie Adam

Wayne Rooney's won it. Steven Gerrard has won it. Thierry Henry and Dennis Bergkamp have both won it. Now, Charlie Adam might be about to join this exalted group. The Scottish midfielder could become the first ever Stoke City player to receive plaudits of any kind by winning this season's Premier League Goal of the Season award.

And fair enough, too. Stamford Bridge is now home to the champions, and yet Adam's thunderbastard of a strike – when one of the best goalkeepers in the world, Thibaut Courtois, was beaten from well within the opposition half – is the best moment of individual brilliance seen there this season.

Should Adam pick up the accolade – for which he is the bookmakers' favourite – some will surely react with disdain. In the Premier League, the Dundee-born midfielder is viewed as something of a misfit. Much of that is down to his physical appearance – and indeed, like Jan Molby he is almost certain to go up a few waist sizes once he stops playing. "Charlie Adam proving that abs don't score goals, 20 Guinness a day and still a left peg to die for," tweeted Portsmouth's Jed Wallace after Adam's wonder-strike.

Andrew Flintoff described the Scot as "a bloke who looks like a bus driver," which was a little rich coming from a man who is literally a walking Jacamo advert. But Flintoff does at least capture, albeit somewhat crudely, what makes Adam so fascinating. You've got football wrong if Adam isn't your favourite Premier League player. I fucking love Charlie Adam.

If you watch Adam enough you'll know that the Scot's 66-yard strike against Chelsea was no fluke. For as long as I can recall, the midfielder has attempted to score from the halfway line at least once in every game he has played. And while the vast majority of those attempts were unsuccessful, he has pulled off the trick numerous times (there's footage of him scoring from about 50 yards out for Blackpool reserves, as well as the lingering memory of a couple of long-range strikes Adam scored during his formative years in Scotland).

And that's the thing. Adam counters many modernities of the sport, but he's still capable of the outrageous. For every raking, cross-field pass he punts aimlessly out of play, there's a deft nutmeg. For every poorly-tracked opposition run, a sweetly struck freekick into the back of the net. Completely functional players are boring anyway. Give me someone like Adam – who will win you a game as often as he will lose one – every time.

Adam's progression and career history up until now hasn't exactly been orthodox either, fitting for a player who has no other modern-day contemporary. At Rangers he was a peripheral figure, farmed out on loans to Ross County and St Mirren while the likes of Alex Rae and Chris Burke held down first-team places at Ibrox. When Rangers made the 2008 UEFA Cup final Adam was an unused substitute, falling completely out of the reckoning in Scotland before joining Blackpool on loan for the second half of the 2008-09 season.

It might have been the sea air or perhaps the availability of first-rate rock on demand, but Blackpool and Adam were the perfect match. At Bloomfield Road the Scot became a toothy-grinned world-beater, dragging the Tangerines to the Premier League one free-kick at a time. Sir Alex Ferguson once remarked that Adam's set-pieces alone were worth £10 million, but he underestimated – for Blackpool they were worth around £90 million in additional top-flight revenue.

In his first Premier League season Adam was hailed as the Scottish Xavi, even if a hyperbolic comparison with Paul Scholes was more appropriate. The midfielder was nominated for the 2010-11 PFA Players' Player of the Year award before earning his big-time move: a £6.75 million transfer to Liverpool.

But at Anfield Adam lasted just one season, because after all Liverpool already had one central midfielder as adept at the dramatically outrageous as he is hopeless at the straight-forward in Steven Gerrard. Although the appointment of Brendan Rodgers – a coach who likes his midfielders to actually run around a bit – was the primary factor in Adam's switch to Stoke, where he has found a true home, as any club that provides ball-boys with hand towels to aid the launching of long-throws into the box was likely to be.

It was at Stoke, about three years ago, that Adam momentarily gave up on football to focus on a career of snapping Gareth Bale's Achilles as many times as possible. Even with Real Madrid supporters baying for blood and battering his car, the Welshman is safer in Spain than he ever was playing against Stoke City. That is the sheer contradiction of Adam as a player.

In the Premier League era Adam is a complete anomaly. In a division where mobility and at least a degree of pace is deemed a requirement, the Scottish midfielder has neither quality – yet is currently completing his sixth successive top-flight campaign in England, amassing over £10 million of transfer fees over the past five years. He can't even get in the Scotland team because Gordon Strachan doesn't see him as mobile enough – and Barry bloody Bannan is in the Scotland team.

Adam has the turning circle of the Exxon Valdez and the stamina of an asthmatic. Perhaps the only reason the midfielder pinged a shot from inside his own half against Chelsea was that he was fucking knackered and couldn't be arsed running any farther.

Every five-a-side kickabout involves one slightly portly guy, who with the ball at his feet is better than everyone else, but doesn't bother his arse to track back, maybe even playing whilst checking his phone with a spare hand. Adam is that player in Premier League terms: playing with bare shins and socks rolled round his ankles, with every other jobsworth in shin-pads.

It's also his personality and character that make him so enchanting. Adam is the kind of guy who dresses up in full garish golfing gear to watch the Masters in his own living room. We know this because he actually did it and posted a picture online to prove as much. I bet he finds Dapper Laughs hilarious, listens to Kasabian and buys James Bond-branded aftershave. But as long as the 60-yard long-range strikes and other moments of fleeting brilliance keep coming, I'll still love him.