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Obsessed with improvement, Marcus Rashford's youth coach explains his meteoric rise

Marcus Rashford never stopped. “He’d ring you up while you’re watching Match Of The Day or the Champions League and say, ‘Did you see [Luis] Suarez then?’” Paul McGuinness, Rashford’s youth coach at Manchester United told Yahoo Sport UK. “Or he’d start looking at his own game and saying, ‘I didn’t get to the highest point of the checklist’. I came back to goal and played it off, when I should have been looking to get forward.”

Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Marcus Rashford
Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Marcus Rashford

Those were the moments that McGuinness knew he was working with someone special. Rashford entered United’s illustrious youth system aged seven, a time at which it can be difficult to gauge a youngster’s true potential.

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“You have to project forward,” he said. “You have to think, well if he’s like this at eight what could he be like at 11? What could he be beyond 11? As you see more of him you see he’s very serious about his football, and that he’s a good learner. Even from the start, if they look like a footballer in the way they move and address the ball then it plants a seed in your mind that you’ve got to keep a check on them. He liked to get the ball and do clever things with it.”

Eventually, Rashford made enough progress to join the club’s Under-18s, but the path that took him there was not without bumps in the road. “When he hit 15 he grew very quickly and couldn’t do the things he could normally do,” McGuinness explained. “He got a little bit frustrated by it, and some people thought he was getting a bit sulky — he’s getting an attitude — but that wasn’t the case. He was just frustrated.

“In that moment you have to say to him, ‘Look, I’ve seen this all before. Danny Welbeck had it, Jonny Evans had it. You have to just be patient, you’ll grow through it, it’ll be fine’. You just reassure them, and make sure they’re not getting too down. You have to adapt the training and what your expectations are for them. In this period they can’t do all the things they’d like to.”

The guidance did not stop there though. “We tried to add to his game by saying, ‘You need a goal obsession,’” McGuinness said. “You need to stay in the middle and arrive where the ball arrives, in the middle of the goal. Colin Little — who’s an ex striker — also worked with him and taught him some movement so that instead of playing with his back to goal he’d be side on and running through with his chest forward.

“If he did come off and receive the ball he’d be quickly turning and running at the opposition. He became more of a number nine that was penetrating behind the defence rather than a clever number 10. It sort of took some time, but he’s a bright boy.”

When discussing Rashford’s need for a ‘goal obsession’ McGuinness draws comparisons with Cristiano Ronaldo, who also developed that same infatuation while at Old Trafford. Eventually it started to click for the 19 year old, and his name began coming up in conversations with Louis van Gaal. The Dutch coach may have left English football failing to accomplish many of his objectives, but as McGuinness is keen to point out, it was his decision to debut Rashford.

“I think not many managers do it because they feel under threat,” McGuinness explained. “And they don’t get a lot of backing from the owners and so on. I think it helped that Louis van Gaal had done it all before. His reputation was intact so he wasn’t worried if it all went wrong.”

During Van Gaal’s tenure over a dozen different United youngsters were handed opportunities in the first-team, but it is Rashford that remains the most successful. His debut — against FC Midtjylland in the Europa League — represents one of the few fortuitous moments in his United career so far. Originally named on the bench, a late hamstring injury to Anthony Martial elevated Rashford to the starting XI.

Then, in the 63rd minute, he arrived in the box to stroke the ball home — just as United’s youth coaches had taught him. He would add a second 12 minutes later and announce himself as the next United academy graduate with long-term potential. “I think everyone does [feel a bit of pride], everyone in the academy,” McGuinness said. “Players do it themselves, but you do gain a lot of pleasure from knowing I helped him along the way. When I left United, Marcus was kind enough to thank me for all I’d done for him.”

Meanwhile, for those fans in attendance that night there is a similar feeling of pride. “The fact he’s local is a source of pride,” Stephen Howson, a contributor to Man United YouTube channel Full Time Devils and a regular attendee at youth games, said. “It’s special when players come through the academy, but if they’re Dutch, or Spanish or French, it isn’t quite the same as if they’re from Wythenshawe. You know their dad, you’ve seen them at the game, you know what school they went to or what junior side they played for. That gives them a connection to the city and the club and that’s as authentic as it comes.”

Of course there remains room for improvement, and Rashford knows that. The arrival of Zlatan Ibrahimovic — the man that settled Sunday’s EFL Cup Final against Southampton — means the teenager may also need to be patient. Yet, in the Swedish forward Rashford has a new mentor and another source to learn from as he continues his own journey to the top.