Muscles Marcus in shape to see off Lukaku
Rashford desperate to hit form in World Cup year
A HOTEL conference room in downtown Houston is not the place you go looking for events of significance in football, though there was something eye-catching about the Manchester United player who sat down to talk in such a location two weeks ago.
The club had never before put Marcus Rashford forward for a press briefing yet his candid 20 minutes of discussion in the team hotel reflected the impression shared by many around Old Trafford that he has grown from boy to man ahead of his third season.
It is one of Jose Mourinho’s rules that players must have their own stage at pre-match press conferences, with no manager present. So Rashford did his own talking ahead of the match against Manchester City, then scored in the 2-0 win.
It is rare to hear a Premier League player discussing unflattering statistics but Rashford, who is 10 weeks away from his 20th birthday, openly observed of his 2016-17 campaign that ‘the stats are what brings it down. They are what you want to bring up.’
It was a reference to his failure to score a single Premier League goal for 196 days between September 2016 and April this year, leaving him with a season tally of only five in 32 appearances.
It is the same number he managed in 11 league games during his first campaign. In 2015-16, those five came from only nine shots, making his Premier League conversion rate more prolific than any other player.
In 2016-17, he ranked 118th on the conversion table, with five from 33 shots. One of the lowest points came last November when, in the depths of his drought, Rashford committed the felony from Mourinho’s perspective of failing to make a challenge for the Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain cross against Arsenal which Olivier Giroud converted to give Arsene Wenger’s side an 89th-minute equaliser at Old Trafford. Words were had in private.
The word from inside Old Trafford is that Mourinho likes Rashford’s fortitude and felt he learned something about the player through that difficult spell. ‘I love the player with character and that kid Marcus is the best example of it,’ said Mourinho post-season. What will be most striking — as Rashford returns to attention again in Tuesday’s Super Cup against Real Madrid in Skopje, Macedonia, then West Ham in the Premier League opener — is the physical bulk he has added.
Mourinho said during United’s pre-season tour that the teenager has ‘grown three centimetres’ but there is more to it.
He has looked bigger and less raw on United’s pre-season tour. The decision not to play a part in the Under-21 European Championship campaign has evidently helped Rashford.
The greater bulk will make him harder to knock off the ball, although equally evident in United’s pre-season tour was a bid to be more decisive in front of goal. Rashford’s goals against LA Galaxy and Manchester City revealed none of his tendency to try to curl the ball past the keeper.
Ten months out from a World Cup in which Rashford is expected to carry English hopes, the most significant question, of course, is whether the signing of Romelu Lukaku will help or impede him.
His £75million arrival certainly means Rashford will remain marooned out on the left — denied the central role which, despite his deference on the subject, is his starting position of choice.
‘We need a target man,’ Mourinho said of Lukaku while on tour. ‘That is not Anthony Martial, or Rashford. Lukaku is the clear nine.’
Lukaku does not seem the type who Rashford can learn from in the way he did with Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Wayne Rooney. At Everton, Lukaku did not hold up play or send others through.
Rashford will have to look out for himself, yet the prospect of him and Lukaku springing forward at pace will give United a dimension which was not there last year with Ibrahimovic.
That should create more space for United’s three forwards, in the 4-3-3 Mourinho seems inclined to use. The Englishman is one of that first-choice three. They say Mourinho likes the teenager’s dead-ball delivery.
We will know how it all translates onto the field of play soon enough.