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Paul Scholes is right. When you see Marcus Rashford scoring for Manchester United, there are definitely shadows of Ruud van Nistelrooy.
Watch the first of his three against RB Leipzig on Wednesday night. The burst of acceleration to leave defenders for dead, the little push of the ball to get past the goalkeeper, and then the opening of the body to find the bottom corner.
Safe, clinical, with no doubt where the ball is going to end up.
The finish was reminiscent of Van Nistelrooy, who scored the second goal of one of his United hat-tricks, also at Stretford End, against Fulham in March 2003.
Van Nistelrooy had also run from his own half, beating five defenders before catching sight of goalkeeper Maik Taylor, suddenly switching feet and effortlessly rolling the ball home.
Rashford had the Leipzig half-run, but the finish was just as ruthless as he passed on goal.
Scholes was in United’s midfield that day and admired the Dutchman’s goal from the field. Perhaps you remembered it in the BT Sport studio after seeing Rashford’s heroics.
“That was like Van Nistelrooy,” he said. ‘You watch it go by and you know it’s going to crash the ball into the corner.
You come to expect this from him. I liked his cruelty tonight, you felt that every time it passed he was not giving the doorman a chance.
‘You’re looking at 25 goals [a season] of him if he maintains that attitude. ‘
Reminds you of someone? But Rashford, at age 22, or 23 this Saturday, is somewhat ahead of his career than Van Nistelrooy was at the same age.
The Dutch forward also had to suffer the crippling knee injury that forced him to completely rethink his art of scoring goals.
Surprisingly, that was Rashford’s first hat-trick at United, but the England international has already looted 74 goals for the club in 223 appearances since an injury to Anthony Martial in warm-up forced a 17-year-old to play with Louis van Gaal. team for a Europa League tie with Midtjylland in 2016.
Rashford scored twice that night, scored twice against Arsenal three days later and has gone from strength to strength ever since.
He is well on his way to surpassing Wayne Rooney’s goal record of 253 United goals and with the best moment of his career ahead of him, the chances are high that Rashford will become a truly world-class footballer.
Rashford is yet to score at the rate he surrenders 25 goals in one season. The 2019-20 campaign was the best so far, with 22 goals, but before it had not exceeded 13.
But the fact that he has seven in nine games so far this season speaks of an increasingly deadly forward with the game. The power of his finals on Wednesday night against a shocked Leipzig was remarkable, as if he left nothing to chance.
That’s certainly from the Van Nistelrooy school of really putting your foot on the ball when shooting. Rashford is much faster than Van Nistelrooy was, but the Dutchman was certainly difficult to stop at full speed.
Both are also very good penalty shooters: Van Nistelrooy scored 51 of the 63 penalties he took during his career. So far, Rashford has scored 13 and missed two.
But while Rashford, 22, has a proven record of scoring at the highest level, Van Nistelrooy, the same age, was getting his big break.
It was at that age that he moved from Heerenveen to PSV Eindhoven for what was then a record transfer fee between two Dutch clubs of £ 4.2 million.
An impressive first season followed in the Eredivisie, the Dutch top flight, in which he scored 13 goals, enough to convince PSV of his talent.
Before that one season with Heerenveen, Van Nistelrooy, who was actually a midfielder in his youth, had been playing in the Dutch second division with Den Bosch and scoring at a modest pace.
But it was at age 22, during his first season at PSV, that we first saw Van Nistelrooy as the lethal striker we came to know.
Although PSV finished only third in the Dutch league, they were the top scorer by some distance and Van Nistelrooy scored 31 goals in the league and 41 in all competitions to be named Dutch Player of the Year.
Ensuring it was not a one-season wonder, his 29 goals in 1999-2000 led PSV to the league title and attracted attention from all sides.
In a 2001 interview, United manager Sir Alex Ferguson revealed that his son Darren, who was having a trial with Heerenveen at the time, alerted him to Van Nistelrooy’s brilliance.
Acting quickly at the start, Ferguson sent scouts to watch PSV’s next game and the forward was booked a day later.
But he did not move to Manchester immediately. There are video footage of the moment when Van Nistelrooy, landing hard after heading the ball in practice, falls to the turf with an anguished cry and begins to grab his knee.
Ironically, PSV had arranged for his training exercises to be filmed to show that he had no knee ligament problems to facilitate the transfer.
WARNING: Distressing content in the video
Ultimately, he delayed his transfer of £ 18.5 million to United for 12 months. After suffering a ruptured anterior cruciate ligament in his knee, Van Nistelrooy went to the United States for reconstructive surgery.
He returned as a different and more deadly forward. ‘My body completely changed. It’s a different stance, ” Van Nistelrooy said in 2003.
That helped a lot if I look back. I got stronger and faster, I did a lot of speed work. ‘
It certainly helps explain the remarkable return of 150 goals in 219 games for United over the course of five seasons at Old Trafford.
Ferguson described him as a ‘great killer’ inside the penalty area and only one of his 95 Premier League goals came from outside.
Losing a year of his career also made Van Nistelrooy incredibly selfish on the field, a quality necessary for any self-respecting striker and attested by goal returns of 36, 44, 30, 16 and 24 in his Old Trafford years. before being sold. to Real Madrid in 2006.
He played for United during a lean period, compared to the great Ferguson teams that came before and after him, winning just one Premier League title, one FA Cup and one League Cup.
Van Nistelrooy was the Premier League’s top scorer in 2002-03 but, as Scholes has recalled earlier, came second in their duel for striker supremacy with Arsenal’s Thierry Henry.
“Whenever he scored or didn’t score, the first thing he did when we got on the team bus was see if Henry had scored,” Scholes said.
“If Henry had scored, he wouldn’t talk to anyone the whole trip home because he was so absorbed in being the top scorer.”
Van Nistelrooy is still regarded as one of the best strikers Old Trafford has seen and what is very encouraging to United fans is that Rashford is ahead of where he was at the age of 22. And it is getting better and better.
Source: m.allfootballapp.com
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