Clever Rash’s exciting my striker sense
THE form of Marcus Rashford and Jesse Lingard is only good news for Jose Mourinho... but it still presents him with a massive headache.
He’s spent hundreds of millions on signing attacking players to give Manchester United an extra dimension, a cutting edge to their sometimes suffocating defensive approach
Yet it is the two homegrown lads who are winning games for him.
I didn’t need his performance against Liverpool to tell me Rashford is a special talent.
I’ve followed him for a long time, and readers of this column will know I rate him as the most exciting youngster in English football.
There’s something about him that just gets the old striker’s instincts tingling. Pace and technique sure, but it’s his intelligence which excites me more.
I’m always reluctant to talk about my own talents, but I never claimed to be the quickest or strongest. If I had anything, then it was in terms of my brain, thinking a step ahead of the defender.
It’s like those scenes from the Robert Downey Jr Sherlock Holmes movies, where everything goes into slow-motion and you compute all the angles and decisions by everyone around you.
I saw that in Rashford for the first goal, which is the stuff of top-class strikers.
He read it perfectly, did exactly what he wanted to do and exploited Trent Alexander-arnold’s inexperience for a tiny fraction of a second.
He also delivers in the big games, which is priceless.
But would he have started if Paul Pogba had been fit?
I can’t know for sure, but I’m not so sure.
Mourinho is his own man. If there is any manager who is going to drop Pogba or Alexis Sanchez after spending so much on them, then it will be him. But even he knows he has to justify his transfermarket decisions.
I reckon this summer Mourinho will take a hard look at the Pogba situation and think about moving him on.
That would let him play the system that worked against Liverpool – and still leave him a formidable defensive platform.
Classic Mourinho, in fact. He got rid of Kevin De Bruyne and Mo Salah. He can do it.