Marcus Rashford is one of England's most promising footballers - but he has probably never put in a more powerful performance than he did off the pitch this week.
The humble, passionate 22-year-old from Wythenshawe in South Manchester deserves every bit of praise he is receiving - regardless of football loyalties in our own city - for a remarkable intervention that means that 1.3 million of the most vulnerable children in the country will now have more food to get by on this summer.
Slightly lost in the wake of the government's screeching u-turn on school meal vouchers this week was the fact that Rashford has already been feeding millions of children throughout the coronavirus crisis through his partnership with the FareShare charity - with a remarkable £20 million already raised.
One would have thought the fact this effort was needed to keep children fed throughout the pandemic may have rung alarm bells in Downing Street about the grim reality facing struggling families through this crisis - but no.
Thankfully Rashford stepped it up again, using the power of his profile and his very personal experiences to embarrass Boris Johnson into the u-turn.
When you think about it, it is remarkable and depressing in equal measure that such an intervention was ever needed.
It is the first responsibility of government in a democratic society to protect and safeguard the lives of its citizens - but here we had a government willing to see children going without meals for an entire summer until it was publicly shamed into a reluctant climbdown.
We know there are already fears within Whitehall that pressure will be applied to maintain the free voucher scheme in future holiday periods - good.
Funnily enough, poverty doesn't stop in the holidays - in fact it gets worse when families no longer have the lifeline of a school breakfast club or a lunch voucher.
The reason Rashford's campaign was so powerful was because it drew on real, painful lived experience, something desperately lacking from our government right now.
It was great to hear the 22-year-old defiantly state that his campaigning work will not end here - families across the country will continue to need his leadership.
In Merseyside there were close to 70,000 children living below the poverty line before the horrors and the hardships of the coronavirus were visited upon our region.
Those statistics don't even take into account the costs of housing - an enormous issue for so many families here.
Boris Johnson may have claimed that child poverty is coming down this week but the statistics simply don't back him, with the child poverty figures in Merseyside up by around 15,000 since 2015.
Find your nearest foodbanks here
In some parts of the borough around one in two children are living in poverty and that number is only going to grow as more families are forced onto an unstable and heavily criticised Universal Credit system during this crisis.
Last year Liverpool Council - hit harder by austerity cuts than any other city authority in the country in the past decade - provided 30,000 meals for hungry children.
Foodbanks have become the norm for so many in this part of the world, with the inspiring Fans Supporting Foodbanks project now a depressingly vital cog in keeping families fed.
Right now we feel a long way off a more equal society, with better wages, improved and affordable housing for all and a compassionate benefits system that is genuinely there for people when they fall on hard times.
Those are the longer term solutions that will work towards a country where we don't need a charismatic young footballer to step in and force through a policy change to bring about such a basic human right for so many children.
Until we see those changes we will rely on people like Marcus Rashford to lead the way where those in power continue to fail.
