Rashford's love affair with Man Utd nears its sad end

Forward ready for a new challenge’ after baffling slump

- LAWRENCE OSTLERE

We already know everything there is to know about Marcus Rashford, one of the most famous athletes in Britain, a bornand-bred Manchester United fan who joined the club aged seven, with a social conscience and an eye for goal, a player with an undoubted gift who has often struggled to locate it. And yet it can sometimes feel like we don’t really know him at all.

With Rashford, there is always a sense that his world is being stage-managed, that his genuine passion for helping his community is needlessly gift-wrapped in PR speak and photo opportunities, like an ailing prime minister in The Thick of It. Take this latest story, that he is ready to leave Old Trafford for a “new challenge”, a message seemingly choreographed while handing out Christmas presents to children at his old primary school.

The journalist trusted to deliver the interview, Henry Winter, wrote the story as a long tweet which began not with the bombshell news that Rashford wanted to leave United – that was left until much later – but that, on handing out gifts, a four-yearold told him: “Thank you for the food as well, Marcus.”

Whether or not you choose to file it under things that didn’t happen, it is hard to escape the feeling that the more we hear from Rashford, the further we get from knowing him, as if he’s caught in a never-ending quest to curate his own authenticity.

Does he want to be the humble star who saved children’s school meals, or the world-class striker rattling in goals, or the tearaway who hit a Belfast nightclub hours after a game? He can be all of those at once, of course. But at 27, does Rashford even know the answer?