Wayne Rooney has delivered a pointed assessment of Marcus Rashford\u2019s position at Manchester United, describing the situation as \u201cstrange\u201d and questioning whether the forward still has the hunger to succeed at the club.<\/p>\n
Speaking on Stick to United, Rooney said Rashford\u2019s talent is not in doubt, but suggested the more important issue is his application and connection with supporters.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s just such a strange one with Marcus because we know he\u2019s got the ability. He\u2019s shown that,\u201d Rooney said.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor me, has he got the hunger, does he want to play for Manchester United? Now, if he wants to play for Manchester United, the first thing he has to do\u2014I\u2019ve been there in 2010 when I asked to leave the football club\u2014he has to build a relationship with the fans.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd the easiest way to do that is to work hard and body language. Marcus\u2019s body language isn\u2019t great, and so it might be something he has to work on. He might have to work with someone to make his body language look better.<\/p>\n
\u201cHis work rate has to improve, but if he wants to be at the football club, he just needs to knuckle down.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rashford has not played a competitive game for United since then, but he has impressed during loan spells with both Aston Villa and Barcelona. Youri Tielemans has said the talk around Rashford\u2019s work ethic was overstated, while Bar\u00e7a boss Hansi Flick has openly regretted his Catalan exit.<\/p>\n
Even so, Rooney believes any return would require Rashford to be careful about the people around him.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf he\u2019s back playing for Manchester United, he has to have a real close look at who\u2019s round him,\u201d Rooney added. \u201cOnly he can say who the people are around him who he really trusts. Because there\u2019s not many people you trust really. It\u2019d be a small amount of people, keep them close to him, go into training, work hard, get himself right. If he does that, he\u2019ll be fine.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rooney also acknowledged that Rashford is the only current United player with a realistic chance of breaking his scoring record.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s a young lad. He\u2019s from Manchester. He\u2019s the one player who can go and get my goalscoring record.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rashford finished his first spell at United with 138 goals, leaving him 115 behind Rooney\u2019s total. Based on his senior scoring rate, it would take more than 350 more games to reach that mark, stretching into his early mid-30s. Even so, a few weeks ago he appeared unlikely to play for United again at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Rooney questions Rashford\u2019s hunger, body language and future at Manchester United.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18599,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[179,172],"tags":[180],"class_list":["post-18600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-manchester-united","category-epl","tag-player-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18600"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18600\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18599"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}