Marcus Rashford at Manchester United: A year on from Euros pain, what now?
The call that Marcus Rashford would probably like to be airbrushed out of history arrived towards the end of a season.
It was Gareth Southgate on the other end of the line and he was proposing they should meet, quietly, without anyone else there. It was time for a chat — just the two of them, away from any distractions.
More than anything, it was time to look forward, not back. When Southgate arrived at Rashford’s house, he wanted to explain why the Manchester United forward would not be included in England’s squad for the Nations League games. Not that an explanation was necessary. Rashford had accepted he did not deserve a place. He knew his form had been poor. What started as a blip had become a full-blown slump since that painful night — the final of Euro 2020 — when he and Southgate last saw one another.
Today marks one year exactly since Rashford watched his penalty flick against the outside of the post and squirm the wrong side of the goal in the decisive shootout against Italy. It was the first of England’s three failures from the penalty spot. Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka were the other two and England’s attempt to win their first major trophy since the 1966 World Cup finished in damp, sudden silence. It has been, for Rashford, his annus horribilis.
He has not played for England since, amid a churn of injuries, rehab and startlingly diminished form, and perhaps he is lucky England have such an empathetic manager.
Southgate, after all, knows what it is like to make that lonely walk from the centre circle in a penalty shootout for England. He knows what it is like for everything to go wrong and the feeling of responsibility that it brings.
“It struck me how dark the night had become,” Southgate later reminisced about his infamous role in the Euro 96 semi-final against Germany. “I was the person who had ended a nation’s dream. England’s loss was down to me. Straight away, I knew this would be a major issue for the rest of my life.”
Yet Southgate would have been mistaken if he suspected Rashford’s deterioration in form was a direct result of what happened at Wembley.
Rashford is wired differently. As crushing as it was, his view is that it should not define him. He wants to take penalties again. He sees it as part of his job. It doesn’t faze him that people will always bring it up. If Cristiano Ronaldo does not return to Old Trafford, Rashford would gladly challenge Bruno Fernandes for the right to be United’s penalty taker. And taking one for England? That wouldn’t trouble him either. The World Cup? No problem — though he has to show he deserves to be in Qatar first.
Rashford’s immediate priority is to reinvent himself for United when the difficult truth is that his form has been strangely dishevelled for even longer than a year. He has spent a large part of the summer getting himself in the best shape possible with an individually tailored fitness programme in the United States. There have been productive conversations with Erik ten Hag, United’s new manager. The focus has always been on preparing for the new season, a clean slate and a fresh beginning with a manager who might understand him better than the last one.
The people who have worked closely with Rashford talk about how determined he is to remind United — and the football world in general — that he still deserves to be regarded as a category-A player. United’s coaches want to believe he can surprise a few people this season. “Serious” is a word that keeps being used to describe his attitude.
Nobody can be sure what is happening with Ronaldo. The same can be said, in different circumstances, about Mason Greenwood. Edinson Cavani has gone and suddenly, unexpectedly, United look conspicuously short of stardust in attack. If they are to have a successful first season under Ten Hag, it feels almost imperative that Rashford follows up the worst year of his professional life with an annus mirabilis.
There was one night in particular when Ralf Rangnick could probably have been forgiven for wondering whether Rashford might ever return to being the player of old — and that, personally, he was running out of ideas about how to make it happen.
It goes back to the second leg of United’s Champions League tie against Atletico Madrid in March and a defeat that, as we know now, hardened Ronaldo’s resolve that he no longer wanted to spend the last few years of his career at Old Trafford.
Rashford, a 67th-minute substitute, entered the play when United were losing 1-0 and staring at the possibility of elimination. A sense of foreboding was gathering in the stands. It needed a hero. It needed a player in United colours to do something special.
But when the ball came to Rashford for the first time, he lost it straight away. The next time it arrived at his feet, the same again. Soon afterwards, he had another go and, again, the ball ended up with the opposition. Rashford’s first three touches ended with him losing possession.
As the crowd’s frustrations grew more audible, a dismayed Rangnick stared out from the touchline. There had been a few of these occasions during Rangnick’s time as interim manager — too many for the German’s liking. Behind the scenes, he and his coaching staff had devoted many hours trying to understand why Rashford had a habit of playing, in Rangnick’s words, like a ghost.
Perhaps it will be different with Ten Hag and the new manager will strike up a better understanding with a player who, in happier times, thrilled Old Trafford with his dynamism, his improvisational brilliance and the general feeling that he was special; born for the big stage.
Rashford, lest it be forgotten, accumulated almost 50 England caps before his 24th birthday. He is still young in football terms — and his 93 goals for United puts him 24th in their all-time list of scorers, one place ahead of David Beckham, two above Eric Cantona.
This is why Southgate took the trouble to visit him, to sit with him and try to get to know him better. The England manager does not do that for every player who is out of form and out of contention — but he was willing to travel to Manchester because he believes Rashford, ultimately, is worth it.
With Rangnick, however, there was often a sense of mystification and this, again, is important context for Ten Hag, two weeks since he introduced himself to the players for the first day of pre-season training. If Ten Hag wants to help Rashford, he has to understand what went wrong in the first place.
But it is complicated and there are no easy answers. There were never any behavioural issues behind the scenes. Rangnick just could not understand how such a talented player kept his gifts so concealed. Time and again, Rashford would look good in training and take part in extra work and video sessions to analyse what was wanted from him. Then match day would arrive and Rangnick was left to suspect he could not get through to the player.
Rashford, it was concluded, did not seem to take on board instructions. For one game, the coaches had worked intensively on what they wanted him to do, in and out of possession. Rashford was a substitute and when he entered the play it quickly became clear he was not going to follow the plan. Again, it was a source of considerable frustration on the touchline. More than anything, it was just perplexing for Rangnick and his coaches.
For his part, Rashford felt there were times when Rangnick overloaded the players with instructions. A lot of those players were never convinced by the man who had been brought in to replace Ole Gunnar Solskjaer. Some had to search his name on Google. Rangnick just did not have the authority that was required to manage an elite club.
Equally, a player who fails to take on his manager’s instructions is never going to be a mandatory first-team pick. Rashford had stopped getting behind opponents and was no longer making runs to the far post. He had stopped doing what made him such a terroriser of defences in the first place. His decision-making in the final third was regarded by United’s coaching staff as erratic.
Were there any mitigating factors? Well, yes, of course there were when Rashford spent last summer recovering from surgery. Rashford had dislocated his shoulder and was always susceptible to it popping again. He delayed the operation to be involved in Euro 2020 and, fitness-wise, that meant he was always playing catch-up.
This is why it must be encouraging for United that for the first time in three years he has a full summer to get himself into peak condition. Even before reporting for pre-season duty, Rashford had devoted himself to a fitness regime at the Red Bull High Performance Centre in Santa Monica, California.
Rashford was accompanied by Robin Thorpe, formerly one of United’s fitness specialists, who knows the player’s injury history, where his body needs strengthening and had a direct line to feed the relevant data to the club’s medical staff. Thorpe, now part of Red Bull’s setup, is said to have been impressed by Rashford’s determination to get back on track and put himself through a pre-season before pre-season.
Rashford has spent other parts of the summer at the LeBron James Innovation Centre at Nike’s headquarters in Oregon, working with some of the world’s leading sports scientists.
He is determined to be in the best condition possible, whereas this time last year he was being advised to have four months off to let his body heal from surgery. Rashford rushed back and came off his painkillers well ahead of schedule. United had signed Ronaldo and Sancho and he wanted to be part of it. Rashford was back in contention by October, returning for the 4-2 defeat to Leicester City that was the beginning of the end for Solskjaer.
After that, nothing really went right. Rashford saw himself as match-fit but not match-sharp. He wanted a run of games to sharpen his mind and told Solskjaer he would not be back to his best until he had three consecutive 90-minute performances. It never materialised and, when he made the same request to Rangnick, it was denied him again. Rangnick’s view was that an elite player should not need this kind of special treatment, especially when he was not playing well enough to stay in the team.
Ten Hag should have a reasonable idea about this because the Dutchman has devoted endless hours to watching footage of United’s games from last season.
It became apparent Rashford’s frustrations could be measured by his body language. If things were not going well, he had a tendency to try a cannonball shot in which the ball is struck a certain way to make it dip unpredictably. It is Ronaldo’s speciality and it looks spectacular when it works. It can also look wasteful, self-indulgent even, when the ball flies into the stand.
A lot has been made about Wayne Rooney’s comments during a black-tie event at a Manchester hotel one night that his former team-mate needs to “fucking get his head out of his arse”.
But perhaps the more relevant comments came from Steve McClaren after an FA Cup tie against Aston Villa in January. Rashford had played badly and the most baffling moment arrived late on when the ball rebounded towards him in the penalty area and, for reasons never properly explained, he completely left it.
“I hate that attitude in a player,” said McClaren, referring to the player’s standoffish performance. “Body language is so, so important… Rashford has probably had this problem throughout his career in terms of questioning his attitude.
“He’s got the talent and the ability. There’s that one cornerstone which we call mentality, attitude, which he hasn’t grasped yet.
“He gets deterred too easily and doesn’t fight through bad moments. He doesn’t stay in the game. If he’s not having a good game, he’s not having a good game. If he’s not having a good first half, he’ll never have a good second half. I just look at him and think that boy needs help, off the field and through the manager.”
McClaren is now part of Ten Hag’s coaching staff and will get the chance to see, close up, whether it is true Rashford lacks competitive courage. Yet it is a criticism that will polarise opinion, and jar with many, bearing in mind Rashford’s childhood, on the poverty line, and his devotion to making it as a footballer. Rashford is a United fan, emotionally invested in the club. He takes it hard — really hard — when he and the team do not play well. It matters.
It pains him that he and Ronaldo have not developed a more effective relationship on the pitch. Rashford had used his time out injured to study how Ronaldo plays. It thrilled him that he would be playing alongside his hero and he wanted to understand the best way to make it work. Yet it has not turned out how he would have liked and Ronaldo, being Ronaldo, can be a challenging team-mate.
Sancho has found out the same and, at times, it can be a bittersweet experience. Ronaldo always wants to be the hero and, more than anything, he always wants the ball. When he does not get his way, he does not hide his displeasure. At times, Rashford has been guilty of trying to find him from all sorts of angles and near-impossible situations when he would have been better looking for another team-mate.
Towards the end of the season, Rashford talked to Rangnick and said the problem was that he was being asked to play on the right. Rashford’s belief has always been that he can operate on the right, and that he understands the need to be versatile, but that he is a more dangerous player on the left. Jose Mourinho, United’s former manager, used to tell him the same. Rashford’s belief is that he can be among the best players in Europe in that left-sided role.
Others feel that he has become too predictable in that position and too reliant on his trick of stepping inside to shoot with his right foot. Either way, a frustrated Rangnick pointed out that he had never asked Rashford to stick rigidly to one side of the pitch. Rashford, it was explained, always had a licence to roam and the freedom, in the correct moments, to drift infield, swap flanks and find space. It was seen as a failure on the player’s part that he did not make it work.
Sancho was preferred on the left and, for a while, Rashford also fell behind Anthony Elanga in the pecking order. Rangnick could never unlock the mystery and, by the end, made little effort to conceal his feelings. “The only thing we can do is speak to him regularly and tell him what we expect from him and what he should do,” he said. “In the end, he has to do it himself.”
In fairness to Rashford, how many players did have a good season at Old Trafford? David de Gea’s team-mates voted him as their player of the year. But what does it say for modern-day United that their goalkeeper is such a regular recipient of these awards?
Perhaps it is a little unfair, therefore, that so much focus has been on Rashford’s regression. Many others at Old Trafford have played badly. Few, however, attract the same kind of scrutiny. Rashford’s charity work, his campaigning for impoverished children and his embarrassing of the UK government (because, let’s face it, he did embarrass them), has given him a platform way beyond football. With that, however, comes heightened scrutiny.
What does irritate him is the popular line taken on by many of his critics that he has blurred his priorities and spent so long delving into politics it started to affect his performances and sent him on this downward spiral.
In reality, Rashford has scaled back his visibility as a campaigner and activist. It is not true that he is involved in non-United work every week. He is no longer so active on Twitter. The Athletic has spoken to numerous sources at Old Trafford and the relevant people have all said this part of his life is not seen as a problem. They are proud to call him a people’s champion. The irony is that at the height of his campaigning, when Rashford was appearing on the national news, collecting an MBE and taking phone calls from the prime minister, he was playing some of the best football of his life.
Has there been any point in the past year when he considered leaving Old Trafford? Yes, is the short answer. In early March, there were stories about him weighing up his options — and it was true that he had started to think about the possibility of moving to Spain.
Rashford was hurt, angry, disillusioned. Imagine how he had felt not to start the Manchester derby even though Ronaldo, Cavani and Greenwood were all absent. It was one of the low points of his season — and the timing of the story went against him, too. United lost 4-1 and the club were unimpressed, to say the least, that within 48 hours they had to deal with reports that one of their high-profile players might want to leave.
Four months on, it is strange how it turns out. Gary Neville’s analysis at the time was that it would be “lose-lose” if Rashford was moved on and a “failure” for all the relevant people at Old Trafford. It was, he said, a “very poor look for Marcus Rashford if he cannot get his form right to break into this team”. Neville made the point that it would be detrimental to the player’s work away from the sport. Rashford’s advisers, he said, would be “naive if they think his off-pitch voice will carry without the Manchester United badge”.
In football, however, a new season always gives under-performing players the opportunity to start afresh.
Rashford finished last season with five goals from 32 appearances and the story of his annus horribilis includes an argument with a fan outside Old Trafford going viral and the awkwardness, on a mid-season break in Dubai, of being photographed with Wiley, the rapper who was banned from social media for making antisemitic comments.
Nobody at Old Trafford, though, is giving up on Rashford and it was revealing to hear Dwight Yorke, now the head coach of Macarthur FC in Australia, talking last week about the time he spent at Carrington, United’s training ground, studying for his coaching qualifications.
“As a coach now, I’d be saying to him he will be playing,” said Yorke. “I remember my time at Aston Villa, when Brian Little came in. He put his arm around me and said, ‘Listen, you are my guy, my go-to guy’.
“I’m just amazed he (Rashford) is not in a good place for some reason. We’ve got a player who somehow needs a little bit of love and attention and needs to hear the correct words, ‘You are in that team, you are one of my main guys’. What I would be doing if I was Erik would be saying to Marcus, ‘You are my guy, let’s get going again’. Show him some trust and believe in him.”
It starts tomorrow with a game against Liverpool in Thailand and, if nothing else, nobody could look at Rashford’s work this summer and say he is not taking his career seriously.
Plus there is another story, never reported until now, that tells us something more about who he is — and why it is important sometimes, even for the players at the top of their profession, to strip it all back sometimes and remind themselves what it is they love about this addictive, infuriating sport.
Some of his old friends had a regular game on the Powerleague pitches at Manchester’s Trafford Centre. It is just a kickabout among mates and, usually, Rashford would leave them to it.
Then, one night last season, he went along to watch and this time he took a pair of boots with him. He wanted to play. He wanted a bit of the freedom that he used to have as a boy. He wanted it to be fun and he wanted to feel like the old Marcus Rashford — which is exactly what Ten Hag, and Southgate, will want this coming season, too.
