It sounds harsh, but Rashford is the bad apple undermining the team. In my Liverpool dressing room the other pros would have slaughtered him
WHEN I look at the way in which Marcus Rashford’s career is crashing, I can’t help thinking back to the Liverpool dressing room I was a part of and what we would’ve had to say about a team-mate behaving like that.
I assure you we simply would not have allowed anyone to conduct himself in such a way. The other pros would have slaughtered him. He would have been called the idiot. The village idiot. He would have been hounded. Ridiculed. Ours wasn’t a dressing room of saints but we had a night out at the right time.
I believe it would have been the same response in Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United dressing room. Rashford wouldn’t have got away with this behaviour at that club because the senior players would have pointed out to him that it’s not the way to act. Fergie would certainly not have tolerated it, either.
It shouldn’t even be the senior players having to tell him the home truths. His brothers are his agents. These are the guys who should be stopping him doing the idiotic things and telling him that he’s making a fool of himself. Embarrassing himself.
But they appear to be enjoying the lifestyle their brother is giving them — getting on board the private jets, flying around the world. They ought to be looking after him and giving him the advice he needs.
If he’s not listening to them, they should be walking away and saying, ‘I think you should get someone else to look after you’. Because you don’t want to be part of his management when, in five or six years’ time, he looks back and finds he has wasted it all.
I’ve thought for some time that Rashford doesn’t look very happy on the field. As if playing football is a problem for him and a burden. Well, I can assure him that these years will be gone all too soon — because for a footballer, it’s such a short life.
He is a talented young man in the prime of his life, who should be approaching his best years. He’s playing for a glamorous club. He’s playing for England. He has Euros and World Cups to look forward to. You think it will last for ever. It doesn’t. These are years he’ll never get back.
Rashford needs to reset and reconsider who he’s listening to. He needs someone to sit him down and help him to make the right moves and enjoy this time. Instead, all he seems to have around him are people filling his head with, ‘Yeah, we can do this, we can do that’.
You would have to say he is not getting the right advice.
While he continues to act like a 19-year-old who has too much money in his pocket, the jury is out on him as a player. I pose this question: Are we seriously saying he is a top player when he has had only one very good season after bursting on to the scene as an 18-year-old in 2016. I would strongly suggest not.
I define a top player as someone who is at it every game, with a minimum seven out of 10 performance. Right now, Rashford is too much of a hit-and-miss player.
United at this time need the best version of Rashford, whereas they are getting the worst — someone who is misbehaving off the field and has scored only five goals in this Premier League season. He is simply not giving himself the best chance to do his job properly on the pitch.
The latest night out is not a first offence and Erik ten Hag will be under pressure from above to discipline him, but at the same time to keep him onside, so the manager can use him.
Fergie would have had Rashford out of the door by now. His last-chance-saloon moment would have been and gone.
Fergie’s squad was such that he could afford to park up David Beckham a few times when he was unhappy with him. But Ten Hag is not in a position to sell Rashford, with his own position under scrutiny and United’s squad a shadow of those under Fergie. Rashford is putting Ten Hag under all sorts of pressure.
MAKE no mistake, though — if this carries on, he will damage that dressing room and United won’t be successful. It might sound a bit harsh to say it but he is the bad apple — undermining the management and the team. He will have pals in that dressing room, but even they will be looking at him asking, ‘Do we want someone like that with us?’
As a manager, I didn’t have a repeat offender of this kind. If you had a guy doing this kind of thing who was also pulling up trees on the pitch, you would be saying, ‘I’ve got to get through to him’. The problem is that everything is so public today. You can’t get away with anything. There are cameras everywhere. You can’t keep anything secret.
This is a classic case of a young man getting too much too soon and thinking he’s a bigger and better player than he is. Because if Rashford’s career ended this weekend, he would be remembered as a nearly-man.
It’s certainly still not too late for him, though.
He has the potential and time to be a fabulous player. There has been talk this week about United getting some help for him but I would suggest that Rashford starts by giving his head a good shake and surrounding himself by the right kind of people.
People who are looking out for him and not themselves.