Marcus Rashford is 27 years old, at his physical peak and has arguably his most fecund years ahead of him. For a boy who dreamed only of playing for Manchester United, whose features were celebrated on a Withington wall, you wonder how he could ever have ended up in Sunday night’s reputational dustbin, with the lid slammed shut by the club’s new manager.
It’s okay to be tactically adrift, struggling to find your spot in a new regime, or even politically sidelined because, after much soul-searching, you accept the time has come to move on. But to flat out not try, as Ruben Amorim alleged, is betrayal. That sentence fell from Amorim’s lips with the force of a guillotine, shredding any chance of a reconciliation.
When questioned about Rashford’s status in the context of a forward line floundering under the aegis of Rasmus Hojlund and Joshua Zirkzee, Amorim had previously asked to wait until the end of the transfer window before expanding on the situation. It seems now that we are waiting only for Rashford’s last rites as a United player.
“It’s the same situation for every player,” Amorim said. “If you do the maximum, if you do the right things … we can use every player. You can see it today on the bench – we miss a little bit of pace to go, to change the game, to move some pieces, but I prefer [it] like that. I will put [Goalkeeper coach Jorge] Vital [on the bench] before I put a player that doesn’t give the maximum every day so I will not change in that.”
It all started so well, three goals in Amorim’s first two games after failing to find the net in seven during Erik ten Hag’s final stretch. Rashford’s flowering was supposed to signal recovery, the start of something good again for the player and the club.
Rashford said he felt re-energised and headed into December full of optimism. Two months later he is the recipient of the most damaging appraisal of all.
It is clear Rashford’s aspirations of a move are entering the critical phase. His silence in the face of Amorim’s accusations are arguably informed by that. It has proven hard enough to persuade clubs to meet his wages without loading the difficulty with personal complications.
Wherever he ends up, Rashford is not only looking for the goals that might help rehabilitate his career but some serious engagement with the public to rebuild his reputation. We have seen how quickly things can change, but not always when character is traduced. Mason Greenwood is rattling in the goals in the service of Marseille but there is no sense he is close to settling the PR account.
Granted Rashford is not tainted by accusations relating to his personal life, yet in the football realm, how you conduct yourself at a club is everything to supporters. And to be seen as one for whom that club is not important or does not matter can leave an indelible stain, especially when that club approaches the scale of United.
Amorim peeled back the layers of Rashford’s outer to reveal, in his view, a bad actor. This is Rashford we are talking about, an academy starlet, one of their own, a player who represented all it is to be a United footballer, suddenly revealed as a fraud, a bloke who does not try and by definition does not care about the club or his team-mates. It does not get any worse than that.
Reconciling Amorim’s characterisation with the mural on the wall, with the lad who went to war with the government over free school meals for impoverished kids during Covid and won, with the 16-year-old who filled supporters with pride during a difficult moment in the post-Fergie world, is heartbreaking for those who idolised Rashford.
And the silence from his camp is shocking. How can he stand by and not defend himself, not shout Amorim down?
Rashford’s only comment was a rather odd well done on the win at Fulham lads, which felt like a political game playing out.
The overwhelming feeling when Amorim was invited to answer one last question in the cramped press room at Fulham was one of sadness, that a player once considered borderline great, who had run himself into the ground for the shirt, playing through injury under Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, could be brought so low, and so brutally.
To be dismissed as someone of less use to Amorim than his 63-year-old goalkeeping coach was not the United epitaph any was expecting of Rashford.