Pressure? It’s child’s play for big boy Marcus
I can cope with being in the spotlight says England star
THE pressure is on Marcus Rashford this season but the Manchester United star believes that is no different to when he was aged seven.
With Romelu Lukaku now at Inter Milan, the spotlight is on the 21-year-old to get the goals to move United back up the league.
This week represents no respite, though. England manager Gareth Southgate confirmed Rashford would start against Bulgaria at Wembley today and the striker is expected to weigh in with his share of goals to take the burden off Harry Kane.
But Rashford believes handling all the expectation is child’s play.
“Without the pressure in football it wouldn’t be the same, the atmosphere wouldn’t be the same,” he said. “The pressure is the thing that draws people to the game and you’re unsure what’s going to happen. That’s what makes the sport beautiful.
“No one can ever add to the pressure that you already put on yourself. Especially at United, you have this pressure on your shoulders that you’ve learned to deal with since you were seven, eight, nine years old.”
Success, Rashford has come to realise, is measured strictly in goals. He has scored four times in his last six England starts, taking his tally to seven overall.
That may pale into insignificance compared to Kane’s 22 but, by the same age, the Tottenham man had netted only once.
Rashford has no qualms about using the England captain as the benchmark.
“It haunts you when you don’t score,” he said. “For me, it’s a big one. When you play well and your team wins, of course you’re very happy, but when you go home, you’re automatically looking back at the game and thinking, ‘Where could you have got your goals?’. For forwards now, it’s completely changed, they’re all sort of set and focused on the end product. “Everybody wants to score as many goals as they can because ultimately they’re the things that help the team.
“So, we use each other’s strengths to make each other better and if you watched training, then you’d see how it all works.
“I could use Harry as an example. He’s one of the best finishers I’ve played with. “Whenever we do finishing, in my head, it’s about being as close to him as possible. So if he scores six, you want to score six, if he scores seven, you want eight.” Raheem Sterling, left, completes a potent trio up front and there will be no repeat of Rashford’s United penalty-taking tussles with Paul Pogba at England level. “Here it’s more simple because Harry’s record is unbelievable.That’s a way for him to get his goals,” said Rashford.
“The players, the squad, the staff all support that.”
MARCUS RASHFORD believes that the fight against racism is being lost and says: “Things have been going backwards.”
The England striker is just one of a number of victims in recent weeks, with Paul Pogba, Romelu Lukaku and Tammy Abraham also being targeted during games and on social media.
And on the eve of England’s match against Bulgaria at Wembley, Rashford said: “It seems to me like things have been going backwards rather than forwards. We have to rely on the campaigns and stuff like that to deal with the situation because our voice only has so much power.
“For me, it is too easy to do what you like on the internet and any of us now can go on and create accounts and write what we want under