Rashford changes mood music and rises above frenzy of amateur analysis
What’s eating Marcus Rashford? Here’s a thought: maybe nothing. Rashford was once again on the bench against West Ham. He stayed there for 62 minutes as United produced a performance that was energetically blank, frantically vague, noisily blunt.
Football loves its bold strokes howsoever, and Rashford did the most important thing in this game, scoring with almost the final kick, four yards out in front of an open goal, after a kind of three-man cavalry sprint from close to halfway ended with Edinson Cavani squaring the ball across the box for Rashford to tap it home and spark a kind of rolling delirium around the stands.
It looked offside in real time. It might have been offside with the benefit of split-frame, tiny margins the usual forensic dissection. But the goal stood and on such tiny margins do entire hastily typed narratives swing.
No doubt the music will shift around Rashford. He scored against Brentford in midweek after coming on as a sub. Is he cured? Is this how it works? Man scores goal: man is now OK? Certainly, the wider reaction to Rashford’s poor run of form over the past few months has been extraordinary.
According to Paul Ince, he’s not happy. Steve McClaren thinks he has an attitude problem. Dion Dublin says he’s “disheartened”. Alan Shearer has, we hear, been offering hints and tips, phone calls, text messages. We heard talk of Rashford training too hard, going to the gym too much, being too obsessed at being good at football.
The melancholia always seemed overblown. Footballers are people too. They have lows and blunt periods. Most of us get to have our blank moments, a lost January, those days where you feel like hiding in the toilet for half an hour reading a catalogue about strimmers, without Alan Shearer hammering on the door asking if you’re feeling OK, peering in through the gap in the door jamb, saying look, we really need to talk, then going to the newspapers and saying you seemed fine but you were reading a catalogue about strimmers.
But then Rashford’s existence is an extraordinary thing at an extraordinary time, when every act, every closeup, every twitch is spun out, pored over, given meaning, processed across every platform. When Marcus Rashford feeling low, playing with an injury, losing his scoring touch must be transformed into a mini-industry of its own, dissected by that unblinking compound eye. This is not really how humans are supposed to exist. What will it do to us?
Rashford has always been streaky, even in his good times. Last season he had the best scoring spell of his career, but ended with three in 18. He played