Hi all, my first thread posted so hopefully it's not a flop but I've been thinking about this for a while now & would love to see some other opinions.
Rashford, to me, shows a total lack of willingness to dribble with the ball. People often think players with bags of pace should be able to beat a man but I think reality is more complex than that. I see it as pace on the ball vs pace off the ball & it's something I don't find people paying enough attention to. Rashford is lightning quick when the ball is played into space for him to run onto or when he has open space to knock the ball into himself and chase after but he moves at a snails pace when he has to keep the ball close to his feet. This is very different to Martial who, whilst probably not being as fast as Rashford at top speed, doesn't lose any of his pace when he has to keep close control of the ball and it allows him to just glide past defenders and wreak havoc.
Rashford is often seen as a big game player but I think the reality is that big games are games against teams like Man City or Liverpool who will attack you and leave gaps, which Rashford will exploit, but he would do just as well vs a small team that attacks and equally he performs poorly vs big teams that play a low block. An example I want to give for my opinion on this is two of our recent games against Spurs. We played Spurs early into Ole's reign when they were still managed by Poch and they used a high line with attacking fullbacks & Rashford was excellent against them with all of the space to work with & even bagged the winning goal. Flash forward to our recent game against the same team, now managed by Mourinho, playing a low block with deep fullbacks & suddenly Rashford was dreadful, never providing a threat or attempting to beat his man & just disappeared from the game.
Next season could further highlight this issue if we bring in Sancho, a player that wouldn't beat Rashford in a race in a month of Sundays, but I can guarantee you he'll beat his fullback 10 times over for every time Rashford does it. Now, I mentioned at the start of this post that I've thought this for a while but I've decided to post about it now because I feel like this issue is being exposed by Shaw's absence. When Rashford faces up with his fullback he gets offered an overlap by Shaw nearly every time & plays the pass to Shaw to mitigate the need to take on the defender himself or the defender tracks Shaw and allows Rashford the space he needs to move into. Brandon Williams doesn't tend to offer the overlap, likely on account of his dominant right foot making it more difficult for him to put the ball into danger areas once he has overlapped, and this is now causing us to see time & again Rashford cutting back or dropping deep & trying to act as a playmaker instead of a winger.
For me it's imperative that Rashford works on his close control next season but what do you guys think? Is it a problem and if so how would you resolve it with our current squad? Or am I just talking nonsense?
Thank you for your time if you do read this long post