I want to be a free spirit like my hero Ronaldo Rashford aims to emulate Brazil legend

MARCUS RASHFORD was an impressionable five-year-old watching his first live game of football when he first set eyes on Brazilian legend Ronaldo.

But the lesson he learned watching the Real Madrid Galactico score a hat-trick in a 4-3 Champions League defeat by Manchester United in April 2003 has stayed with him.

“He always played free,” the England striker said simply. “No matter where he was playing, he played free and went out there and expressed himself. When you do that, that’s when you play your best football.

“You model yourself on him naturally. When you’re young you watch clips of the best players in the world and try to emulate them.”

Rashford acknowledges his specific memories of that night at Old Trafford are a bit sketchy but his view of Ronaldo himself has been reinforced over the years thanks to a diet of YouTube clips hand-fed to him by older brother and mentor Dwaine.

So it is no surprise that his face, normally furrowed in concentration during media interviews, breaks into a smile when some old comments from his hero are REPORTS replayed to him. “He’s a very good young player,” said Ronaldo as long ago as May 2016. “I see some of myself in him for sure – he has courage and he’s fast and is very good with the ball. For the strikers, they have to be hungry to score and I see that with him. He has an amazing future.”

Rashford all but blushed. “I used to watch a lot of him growing up,” he said. “All of his games. He was my brother’s favourite player, that’s why I’ve grown up watching so much of him.

“He was obviously a top player who won a lot of things in his career, so when you know he’s saying good things about you then it really stands out.”

Ronaldo will not be the only Brazil legend keeping one eye on the Manchester United striker tomorrow when Brazil visit Wembley. Rashford was also rubbing shoulders this summer with Ronaldinho – the man whose floated free-kick wrong-footed David Seaman and knocked England out of the 2002 World Cup. “He was also a top, top player,” said Rashford. “That sort of player is rare but Brazil had two of them. I bumped into Ronaldinho in the summer. He was in a Nike complex where we were doing some training and he had some commercial stuff to do. He’s a really nice guy and obviously had a fantastic career.” Two top-notch

strikers is something England manager Gareth Southgate wants to see more of as the man who played in the era of Alan Shearer and Teddy Sheringham looks to forge a new strike partnership to spearhead England to success.

These days, most teams play with just the one striker, but the experiment to play first Tammy Abraham and then Rashford alongside Jamie Vardy against Germany on Friday night has been deemed a success. “Everybody saw that system and what it allowed us to do the other night and what it might allow us to do moving forward,” said Southgate. “We have some flexibility in what we can do because we’ve got different players to come back into the team and into the squad, but certainly I like the idea that we can get two forwards on the pitch. “Not so many teams do that these days and it’s not a problem that defenders have to face so often which can give you something that causes an opposition a fresh challenge.” Rashford, for one, is all for it. “Playing in a two is easier,” he said. “It’s just about understanding each other’s games and building those relationships, which you can do off the pitch as well. So the more we do it the easier it will be. “Like anything new, it takes a bit of getting used to. But the more we do it the better we will become at it.”