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.”

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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.

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“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.”

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