Rashford throws down the gauntlet

Opinion

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This article was published 01/03/2024 (559 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Marcus Rashford wants you to know how much he loves Manchester United, and that the club is lucky to have him.

If you doubt it, you can, as he writes in his Players’ Tribune essay published Thursday, ask his mum.

“I don’t normally like to respond to things said about me. It’s not in my nature,” he writes, before responding to things said about him for more than 2,200 words.

If United needed a distraction ahead of a Manchester Derby they’ll almost certainly lose (Sunday, 9:30 a.m., FuboTV), they got one. They didn’t need it, not another one, and certainly not from a purportedly selfless player who has gone and made it all about himself.

Now, there are times when a team can use this sort of spotlight to divert attention away from a group under intense scrutiny. They often engineer it, and it’s typically the manager whose pre-match remarks free up the group to prepare in the sunshine while the storm shifts elsewhere.

If Rashford’s manifesto can serve a similar purpose ahead of the City showdown, it’ll at least have done something constructive. A happy accident. Because it wasn’t intended to do any such thing.

What it has done is heap even more pressure on a forward with only five goals this season, a previously undroppable England international now at genuine risk of being omitted from the Three Lions’ squad for Euro 2024 — or, at best, uninvolved in it.

One would think his best response to the criticism would have been a tally or two at Etihad Stadium this weekend. Now, if his shoulders slump and he sulks around the pitch like he has for much of the current campaign, those 2,200-plus words will read less like self-defence than an obituary.

That said, you do tend to sympathize with the 26-year-old, or at least wonder sincerely where his irresistible form of a year ago has suddenly gone. To that end, it could very well be that he’s simply worn down from being the best hope at a club in its worst period of the Premier League era.

Rashford’s introduction to United was in a youth set-up that watched the senior team win five titles and the Champions League in seven seasons, but by the time he debuted as an 18-year-old iconic manager Sir Alex Ferguson had retired, the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo, Nemanja Vidic, Rio Ferdinand, Paul Scholes and Ryan Giggs had gone, and chief executive Ed Woodward was making one hairbrained decision after the next.

That was eight years and five managers ago. At the same time, Manchester City replaced United as both the region’s and the country’s leading enterprise, leaving Rashford as the primary figure at a failing club almost constantly in crisis.

In that light, Rashford’s entire professional career has twinned personal excellence, if somewhat inconsistent, with collective disappointment. And now, with the cautious optimism surrounding Sir Jim Ratcliffe’s partial takeover of the club — inclusive of technical and facility overhauls — the dejected shadow he casts is all the more noticeable.

For the player, personally, you almost hope he can rediscover himself, and the joy he once took in his football, someplace else, with a fresh slate.

It might be best for his current club, too.

Since Ferguson’s exit, and the demarcation line that fairly or unfairly exists immediately following it, no one has played for Manchester United more often than Rashford. He represents — and this is unquestionably and extremely unfair — the drop in standards at a club that used to set them. That’s not on him.

One of Ratcliffe’s most difficult judgments in the early days of his ownership will have to do with whether to make a clean break from everyone and everything associated with the last decade’s failures.

Luke Shaw, Anthony Martial, Victor Lindelof and Jadon Sancho will be part of that thought process as well, though the emotional attachment involved with Rashford is something else entirely.

For now, there is the occasion of a Manchester Derby and the situation of a United superstar that has taken on some immediacy.

“If you back me, good,” he concludes in his article. “If you doubt me, even better.”

He’s thrown down the gauntlet in front of himself. One way or another, his United future gets sorted now. There’s no walking it back.

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