The evolution of Marcus Rashford: How studious striker turned himself into Manchester United's goal-obsessed talisman
It was not uncommon, even recently, for one of Marcus Rashford’s family to pop their head around his bedroom door and find the Manchester United striker asleep on his bed, an open laptop flickering next to him with footage of the great and good of world football.
Rashford would often squirrel himself in his room, his mobile phone left downstairs, and immerse himself for hours in clips of Lionel Messi, Thierry Henry, Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney, Neymar and others on YouTube.
He would not watch Messi simply for the pleasure of it, though. Rashford was studying very specific actions that might have led to the Barcelona maestro scoring or creating a goal – the way he opened his body to receive the ball or deceive an opponent, for example, or why he made a particular run at a particular angle at a particular time. The thirst for information, for self-improvement was, and remains, insatiable.
Such vignettes will not surprise the coaches who have watched Rashford grow into one of the most explosive, exciting young forwards in Europe, a 22-year-old world beater in the making whom United can ill afford to be without against Liverpool at Anfield on Sunday.
A Champions League game might have been on the television and those coaches’ phones would invariably beep with a text message from Rashford hungrily dissecting a small detail or passage of play. It still happens now.
“He texted me the other day after Man City played,” says Colin Little, a coach with United Under-18s and a prolific former lower and non-league striker who has worked closely with Rashford. “A ball came into Sergio Aguero and Marcus was asking if I’d seen how Aguero had front-rolled the ball with his studs because that was the only way he could get it in the right position for him to get his shot off. He’s a student of the game. You’ve pricked his curiosity as a coach and, when a guy like him gets curious about it … wow.”
There is good reason there was a sharp intake of breath when Rashford was substituted in midweek against Wolves after taking another knock to a troublesome back he has long been forced to manage but the feeling is he should be fit enough to start against the Premier League leaders. With Scott McTominay and Paul Pogba already missing, United’s talisman is more indispensable than ever, as shown in the stats below.
Southampton’s Danny Ings is the only Premier League striker with a higher percentage of goals against the “Big Six” than Rashford since the United and England forward made his debut in February 2016, barely six months after Little was enlisted to work specifically with the then 17-year-old on his movement, positioning and finishing.
The dedication and application was always there but it has been fine-tuned and, with increased maturity, experience, confidence and responsibility, the results this season have been startling. Twenty-two goals for club and country tell their own story. Rashford has refined his diet with the help of his personal chef, Tina. He is obsessive about the amount of electrolyte water he drinks – not enough during the day and he can feel his calves cramp after about the 70th minute in matches.
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer is not the only one at United to see shades of Ronaldo in the way Rashford applies himself. He has worked hard to improve his left foot, and took great pleasure in his cushioned left-foot volleyed finish against Norwich City last weekend, when he darted behind his man to convert a cross from close range – an “exact replica” of a training-ground move the week before, according to Little. Similarly, his aerial ability – witness his header against Newcastle on Boxing Day.
If anything, he gets a greater “kick” now, as one source tells it, out of scoring those predatory goals in and around the six-yard box (think Liverpool and Sheffield United as well as Norwich) that Solskjaer has been banging on about than the “worldies”. More than anything, Rashford has become goal-obsessed.
When Solskjaer was choosing his team to face Colchester in the Carabao Cup last month, Rashford was badgering his manager to play him. He saw it as an opportunity to boost his goals tally. Ronaldo and Rooney used to be the same with Sir Alex Ferguson.
“He’s multitalented but he’s now goal obsessed, too,” Little says. “We wanted him to be disappointed if he didn’t score. That wasn’t him at the start but now he is. It’s hard to tell people at the start that you want to compare his goals tally to Ronaldo – they’re like ‘You what!’ – but when you’ve got someone as athletic, fast and talented as him, if you can add the goals to his game the comparisons are there.”
Little’s task from the summer of 2015 was to get Rashford learning how to play on the shoulder of defenders and running in behind, “chest forward or on the quarter or half-turn”, rather than always looking to come deep, turn and beat men. That, and the variation of his finishing. The strides Rashford has taken as scorer of all kinds of goals are, Little says, a riposte to those who claim strikers are only born, not made.
“Marcus is proof you can learn,” Little said. “At the end of every game, whether he’s scored or missed a goal, we’ll talk about it. When he came on against Wolves away in the Cup, he hit the bar almost straight away. But he actually didn’t get his first touch to the right place he wanted. I mentioned that and he agreed. He knew it.”
Those close to Rashford talk about him going into a “focus bubble” during weeks of big games. In the week when United beat Tottenham and Manchester City, with Rashford scoring three times across both games and terrorising the opposition, his family would be ringing each other asking if they had “heard from Marcus”. Rashford does not care much for his phone – he prefers to spend time with his two dogs at the Cheshire home that his brothers, Dane and Dwaine, and mum Melanie, vacated about 18 months ago. He has been known to Whatsapp fairly regularly with Neymar, though, and Rooney rings him from time to time.
He likes to read, too, a suggestion from family as a way of relaxing after games. Rashford was bought autobiographies of Henry, Neymar and others as Christmas presents but his reading has broadened considerably since Euro 2016. He recently read The Power of Now, an international bestseller by Eckhart Tolle focusing on spiritual enlightenment and enjoyed Michael Calvin’s No Hunger In Paradise, which examines the pressures and pitfalls that prevent young players from making it. Rashford has certainly made it. It is just a question now of how far this brilliant footballer’s star ascends.
