Marcus Rashford’s 100th Manchester United goal was a majestic header that propelled them to the points and came before a watching Gareth Southgate. If the England manager can be grateful to Erik ten Hag for revitalising the forward before the World Cup, the main story here concerned how the Dutchman continues to elevate United.
Rashford is the epitome of a footballer reborn, the lost boy of last season replaced by a super-confident forward whose seventh goal of this campaign is an apt emblem of the team’s upward trajectory. As a product of the renowned United academy, on the 85th anniversary of it supplying a player to every matchday squad – 4,163 since 1937 – the boy from Wythenshawe’s strike was perfect, too.
Rashford's words on the Academy remain as apt as they did in 2019 – so we thought we'd revisit his thoughts in the aftermath of another milestone for the club: 85 years in which every matchday squad has featured a player from our youth ranks.
WYTHENSHAWE EXPLAINS HOW MARCUS RASFORD WAS DISCOVERED
When I was playing in America, back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I used to travel a lot with my teams up and down the country, playing matches all over.
So, it was a surreal experience for me recently to be running around various shops in Manchester trying to pick up a copy of Time, because I knew the young man who was on the cover of the latest issue. A young man who grew up in the same part of Manchester as me. A young man who – only six years earlier – I’d been regularly picking up and dropping off at home before and after training.
This was before he was Dr Marcus Rashford, MBE, of course.
I’d heard about Marcus before I first saw him play. One of my fellow coaches, Eamon Mulvey, was the head coach of his age group and he was raving about him all the time to me. “This kid Marcus…” It was constant. I always trusted Eamon’s judgement too, so I realised that this lad must have some talent.
When I first saw Marcus play, not long afterwards, he was only eight or nine years of age but straight away I understood why Eamon had been chewing my ear about him. We had a four v four programme and Marcus was involved in that. Now, four v four is the type of programme where any technical ability will immediately show, and it certainly did when I saw him play. He had a very precocious talent. Even at that age, you could see that he had something special about him. He had the X-factor.
His technical ability was what stood out. His ability to control a ball, receive it, pass it, shoot, head, and he had a natural understanding of the game, where to go. At that age you can’t project forward too much, but we knew that the challenge for us was to support him and get his development right. If this young man wasn’t going to get to where he wanted to go, it was probably going to be because we were doing something wrong ourselves. That’s how good he was. We could only mess this up.