Marcus Rashford completes turnaround to become Manchester United’s lethal leader

Marcus Rashford is reflecting on becoming the lethal leader of Manchester United’s attack after a lost season that the 25-year-old says: “I can’t get back.”

The starkest way of comprehending the turnaround: in 2021-22 Rashford scored five goals in 32 appearances; this season he has 24 in 36. Sunday’s double in the 3-0 victory against Leicester at Old Trafford took him to a career-high count for a campaign and he is the force Newcastle are desperate to stop in Sunday’s Carabao Cup final.

Yet in the close season Rashford appeared to be heading for the exit. Ole Gunnar Solskjær had been sacked the previous November and by March the last of Rashford’s five strikes were scored and the interim manager Ralf Rangnick said the England international could leave if he wished.

Context is needed. Rewind a year or so before then and the boy from Wythenshawe had been playing with the pain of a shoulder injury that was finally operated on in summer 2021. It meant no pre-season and Rashford came back into Solskjær’s listing side, and an unhappy changing room, when he returned in October. United fans booed Rashford for failing to follow up a loose ball in an FA Cup tie against Aston Villa the following January and there was public despair at his confidence disintegrating to such an extent that he was cast as a certainty to miss when through on goal or even fail to control a pass.

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Not any more. Now Rashford is adored and expected to bury every chance. He offers an honest explanation why. “I don’t think anyone – apart from the people at the club – know how long I was dealing with those [injury] issues,” Rashford says. “It wasn’t just one season, it was a period of time where every day was tough and you have to sacrifice [yourself]. I’ve always been one to be out on the pitch as much as I can – that’s where I get the happiness.”

Before the shoulder issue was a back fracture sustained in January 2020 that ruled him out of the next three months of a campaign paused in March by Covid, before he returned in June when football restarted. The next term – 2020/21 – appeared a triumph: Rashford scored 23 goals as United finished second under Solskjær but all was not well – after the Euros came the shoulder operation.

“If I’m out injured, I’m not happy,” Rashford says. “At times, you have to pull yourself out [of the side] and if you don’t, then you have to get people around to pull yourself out and that’s what happened with the shoulder situation. It was the right time to get it fixed. I recovered quite quickly from that.”

Now comes the admission about last season: “Then the season happened; I can’t get it back, but one thing I can do is learn from it and try and do everything I can to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

So far so good on this ambition, owing to two factors. Hiring Erik ten Hag has given United their best chance since Sir Alex Ferguson of being true contenders again, and a manager able to rebuild Rashford’s shattered mental state while honing his game. Rashford’s focus also came into play: he forgot the notion of leaving his boyhood club – Paris Saint-Germain had been vocal suitors – and in the off-season worked on his physique and fitness at Nike’s headquarters in Oregon.

Next, he started scoring – copiously – and a goal celebration that features him pointing fingers at his temple emphasises the reboot, the gesture demonstrating that his “head is in the game” now. This Rashford has a joy and freedom and offers leadership that makes him a de facto captain. When speaking about how Sunday’s final may initiate a successful era under Ten Hag, he may be urging team-mates to listen, emphasising the point by citing how winning the 2017 win under José Mourinho led to Europa League glory a few months later.

“We won the other trophy off the back of that,” he says. “It gives you that winning feeling and the belief. When we played the first game of the Carabao Cup [this term] we didn’t want to get to the final and lose, we wanted to go and win the tournament.”

Of his own improvement, Rashford says: “I’m in the areas to score. It’s something I’ve been working on and in the last few years, I feel like even the seasons where I’ve done all right I could have added another 10 or 15.”

There is self-awareness, too. “Football is probably 95 per cent your mentality,” he says. “That gives you the baseline to perform. There are a lot of players that have ability – that’s why they play at the top level. But what sets them apart is the mentality. I’ve been on both sides of it. I understand the strength of it and the value. I’m concentrating a lot more on keeping myself in that headspace and it’s needed in order to win games and trophies.”

Ten Hag’s decision to leave Rashford out of the team for the New Year’s Eve visit to Wolves for oversleeping was taken in the correct way: after coming off the substitute’s bench, United’s number 10 scored the 76th-minute winner.

He supports the manager’s stern discipline. “One hundred per cent,” Rashford says. “If I was a coach, I’d have done the same. Because if you don’t have standards in the training ground, how do you expect to go out on the pitch and win consistently? It’s impossible.”

Rashford, who has played under Louis van Gaal as well as Mourinho, Solskjær and Rangnick, is frank regarding previous standards at the club: “If you’re going to allow each other to slip or have an off day and no one says anything about it … which is at times a position that we’ve been in. And once you’re in it it’s difficult to get out of it because it becomes normal and I’ve not seen it at this club before. It was a little bit strange and it’s even more strange when you’re involved in it [at Wolves]. So it’s constant reminders about discipline.

“For me, it was not starting a game but you accept it, you move forward. We spoke about it afterwards a little bit, briefly, but once he made that decision, it’s his decision and you have to respect it.”

Just as Newcastle respect the danger Rashford poses. – Guardian