It was the day that Uefa confirmed, as kick-off approached in Barcelona’s Champions League season, that La Liga’s champions would begin their home campaign in the competition against Paris Saint-Germain next month where they ended the last one, at the Estadi Olímpic Lluís Companys. With their supporters getting ready to renew their journey up the slopes of Montjuic that few of them care for, their climb to potential glory mirrors the hopes of one of their new arrivals.
And how he has arrived. Flags do not get planted at the summit much more emphatically than this, and Marcus Rashford could not have picked his moment better to announce himself with Barcelona. His first two goals for the club, setting them on the road towards a trophy this team is determined to make theirs on a night back in his homeland, with the vacuum of the transcendent but injured Lamine Yamal waiting to be filled, didn’t so much state an intent to become important for Hansi Flick’s side as yell it from the top of the Cheviots.
Before this the tale of the Rashford tape in Spain had been of gentle progress, of promise, such as his first assist for the team at the weekend on his home debut (and what a strange home debut it was, staged at the 6,000-capacity Estadi Johan Cruyff with Camp Nou yet to get the safety sign-off to partially reopen), a 6-0 demolition of Valencia in which he intermittently looked bright before the bigger boys, the rotated Raphinha and Robert Lewandowski, entered stage left to finish the discussion as night drew in.
This appeared to be the life he had signed up for. The Barcelona experience presents a quandary for Rashford. This year’s loan spell at Aston Villa underlined that he was (and still is) a hi-spec reclamation project, showing enough to remind us that he is a player of rare talent but not quite enough for a club to want to bet big on him. The deal to take him to Barcelona was a product of both parties’ respective current circumstances, with them “still checking each other out,” as Sly Stone once put it in Family Affair.
Even Flick’s warm words for Rashford in his press conference on the eve of the game were partly conditional. If many have chosen to focus on the coach’s description of his player’s “unbelievable” qualities, Flick’s thoughts were based on his initial impressions of Rashford when emerged in Manchester, dazzling for club and country. The subtext was very much that of ‘if’. Quite how he could answer that, how he could find that long lost consistency while playing Richard Ashcroft to Raphinha, Lewandowski and Lamine Yamal’s Oasis, is hard to say.
And so here Rashford is, the not-cheap-but-cheaper option to fill a key role in this squad. If goalkeeper Joan García was the summer’s most expensive signing – and the one that created the most polemic, with the decorated Marc-André Ter Stegen not taking his younger counterpart’s arrival or his own demotion well – then Rashford’s was potentially the most important. The club’s sporting director Deco spoke frequently about his priority in what he correctly feared would be a quiet transfer window; securing cover for Raphinha and Lamine Yamal, protecting them as Barça aim to go the distance in the Champions League and snare the treble that slipped through their fingers in Milan last May.
Rashford had filled that role tidily, patiently in the first half, team focused and not too desperate to impress. He led Barcelona’s first meaningful escape from their own half, towards the end of an opening 10 minutes of home pressure and white noise. He sold a dummy to his England teammate Kieran Trippier on halfway and sped towards goal, only to hit his shot beyond the near post. But this was the Rashford that Flick had enthused about the day before the game.
Yet for all the club’s insistence that he had arrived as a wide forward and not a central one, Rashford’s powerful flicked header to open the scoring in a Leazes End net he has made bulge many times before for Manchester United reminded us of his versatility; an undoubted asset at a club which, remarkably given its glamour and stature, must often still make do and mend. His second, driven in with the sort of confidence which suggests he could make himself really belong among Barça’s stars, was less a hint that he is a potential alternative to Lewandowski than a demand.
And maybe he did so because this is his place, as it has been before, in the Champions League – scoring winners at the Parc des Princes for Manchester United or terrorising the modern behemoth-sized PSG for Villa in the closest the European champions came to being denied that title back in spring. A marriage of convenience it may be, but the suspicion from this is that Rashford and Barça could suit each other down to the ground.
