Marcus Rashford in a Barcelona shirt is already one of the season’s most fascinating threads. The link with Lamine Yamal, Pedri, Rafinha, Dani Olmo et al will light up the football chat all the way to the World Cup.
Listening to Rashford articulating his thoughts with Gary Lineker and Micah Richards on The Rest Is Football podcast, it was clear that making Thomas Tuchel’s World Cup squad next summer was at least a part of the rationale for the move to Barça. That and to straighten a career that had veered wildly off course during his last two seasons at Manchester United.
What Rashford really thought of the unravelling of his boyhood dream will have to wait for the book. Whilst the move to Barça and all that relocating to a foreign city entails – Spanish culture, language concerns, etc – is interesting enough, it barely touches the sides when it comes to the stuff we really want to know about.
Why did it all go so wrong for you under Erik ten Hag? What was really behind the Belfast bender? How did you feel when Ruben Amorim said his goalkeeping coach was more selectable than you? What was it like being exiled to the “bomb squad”?
For a kid steeped in Manchester United lore, the prodigy around whom the club’s post-Fergie resurrection would be shaped, the face of United, the mural on the wall, the idea of leaving Old Trafford would have been anathema. Yet that was your fate. Those questions were never put by Lineker and his side-kick, just a few, soft entry, general inquiries about what went wrong with the team.
Rashford’s personal association with the club, how he felt about being forced out, and what he might have done differently was never addressed. Lineker is a savvy media operator. He would have wanted answers to those questions. The inference must be that Team Rashford shut down that line of inquiry at the outset.
This is how star power works. A sit-down with Rashford is a permanent fixture on the wishlist of media organisations. Rashford is so A-list that operators will engage on almost any terms knowing the eyeballs will follow as the content gets picked up, recycled and amplified.
Except in this case the shelf-life as a hot news item was annihilated by the soft-focus conditions we have to assume were imposed by Rashford. What was left was largely anodyne reflections about what it is like training at Barça, the differences in emphasis, ball work in Spain vs running about a lot in England, language learning, is Duolingo any good? That kind of thing.
Rashford’s insights on Mourinho were the highlights of an otherwise anodyne interview (Photo: Getty)The closest it got to interesting were Rashford’s reflections on his early managers, Louis van Gaal, who gave him that electric debut nine years ago against Midtjylland, Jose Mourinho and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer. Van Gaal, he said, was primarily concerned with playing beautiful football, which came as a surprise to those who watched the sterile patterns sideways and backwards, and Mourinho’s win-at-all costs mentality.
Mourinho, he said, would pore over the details only in defeat, pointing out where it all went wrong. After victories, he wouldn’t bother. A win’s a win, we don’t need to know why or how, that’s what we are paid to do, win games, move on.
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When snippets of the interview began to appear online, websites fired up audiences with the best United-related snippets they could muster, the club is stuck in “no man’s land” being a favourite, without a clear idea of how to progress.
A reference to Jurgen Klopp at Liverpool demonstrated the value in choosing a manager and sticking with him. United, he said, were always reacting to new managers, which made the post-Fergie transition so much more difficult.
Well yes, Marcus, but we didn’t need you to tell us that. We could see that for ourselves. What we really wanted to know was the insight only you could reveal, how being at United at this time touched you and how having to leave, and the reasons behind it, made you feel?
Were you culpable at all? Could you have done better, acted differently? And what is your truthful opinion of Ten Hag and Amorim, the coaches who ultimately ran you out of town? Regrettably, that remains a story for another day.
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