Gavan Casey

THE MOST TALKED-ABOUT football player in America, quarterback Shedeur Sanders endured a nightmare in his final game for the University of Colorado Boulder on Saturday night.

Sanders took four sacks for acres of yardage and threw two interceptions alongside his two touchdowns — albeit one of them was unfortunate — as his Buffaloes side were blown out by the BYU Cougars in the Alamo Bowl, a ceremonial showpiece between highly regarded non-playoff teams which can affect each side’s national ranking the following season.

Sanders has been coached at Colorado by his father, and one of America’s greatest ever sportspeople, Deion ‘Prime Time’ Sanders: the only man ever to play in the Super Bowl (he won two of them) and in baseball’s World Series (he lost one in 1992).

The young QB’s patchy performance against BYU cast further doubt as to whether he has inherited enough of his father’s athleticism, or whether he boasts the situational awareness to succeed in the NFL in his own right.

But even if he’s ultimately a B-grade physical talent, Shedeur Sanders will almost certainly be chosen first overall in the NFL draft on 24 April; not because of who his father is but because he’s a consensus ‘A’ grade in what American football scouts call ‘The Intangibles’.

The TV broadcast caught it in the third quarter when Sanders — his team in a 20-point hole, dead and buried — was seen coaching on the sidelines a younger teammate whose college football journey is not yet over.

Sanders is the kind of fella who shoulders the weight of his team, even at personal risk. Whereas most college quarterbacks would seek to avoid injury ahead of the NFL draft and pull themselves out of a relatively meaningless bowl game once the opposition’s lead had become unassailable, Sanders stayed in there and polished the turd that was the final scoreline.

Whatever kind of player he transpires to be, he’s the ride-or-die character around whom one NFL franchise will attempt to build a team.

It should come as no surprise at this point that Ruben Amorim has found Marcus Rashford to be lacking in these exact qualities.

Rashford has confounded every Manchester United manager since his first, Louis van Gaal, who expedited his progression into the club’s senior team during a 13-player injury crisis in February 2016.

He is a B-grade talent — nothing to be sniffed at — who has performed to a C- or D-grade standard for more seasons than he has played to par. The Intangibles on his 2024 report card read simply: ‘See me after class.’

“The only thing we can do is speak to him regularly and tell him what we expect from him and what he should do,” said Rashford’s manager. “The rest has to be done by himself. We all know that Marcus can play better, but in the end he has to take the steps himself.”

That manager, by the way, was Ralf Rangnick, who said that about Rashford nearly three years ago.

Just a fortnight later, Rangnick, aware of his own impending departure, made his now-famous proclamation that Manchester United as an institution required “an operation of the open heart”.

That surgery was ultimately performed with a tablespoon as United attempted to scoop out the root cause of their internal, interminable rot.

As it so happens, it wasn’t Paul Pogba, who was effectively ushered out the door during that same Rangnick interview. It wasn’t Jesse Lingard, whose contract was also allowed to expire that same summer. The eventual extraction of Cristiano Ronaldo solved little to nothing. Anthony Martial, for years seen as a symbol of United’s rot, was clearly just a benign lump.

And make no mistake about it: it will one day become apparent that Marcus Rashford was not the disease, either. But he’s also clearly not the cure.

Most striking about Amad Diallo’s goal against Tottenham in United’s recent EFL Cup defeat, in which he closed down Spurs ‘keeper Fraser Forster and tackled the ball into the net, was how un-Rashford-like the whole thing was.

Rashford treats his role out of possession with the contempt of the player he was expected to become. It’s not sustainable in 2024. It’s too annoying. Football has morphed enough even since 2016 that this model of attacker is being recalled to the factory.

Still, during Monday night’s meek 2-0 defeat to Newcastle, one couldn’t help but wonder if Amorim had been too swift in condemning Rashford to the scrap heap, the forward’s ostracisation continuing into its fifth game — albeit on this occasion he was at least an unused substitute.

The glaring reality is that across those five games, United have created virtually nothing. They’ve lost four of them. They are an omnishambles.

Joshua Zirkzee’s hapless outing from an inside-left forward position against Newcastle saw him sacrificed in the first half for midfielder Kobbie Mainoo with United 2-0 down. When Amorim’s side consequently gained a foothold during the second half, bold-boy step graduate Alejandro Garnacho was unleashed from the bench and continued his run of not having beaten a defender for about six months.

Add Diogo Dalot into the equation and United’s entire left flank is now effectively a toxic wasteland where the ball goes only to die.

Rashford will never truly fit Amorim’s system for a variety of reasons and this will be his final season at Old Trafford for reasons even more obvious, but it’s unlikely at this point that we’ve seen the last of him in United colours.

Rashford’s last two outings under Amorim were poor and the manager’s banishment of the attacker in recent weeks, however justified, has coloured the perception of Rashford’s season as having been another one of his absolute stinkers. But it hasn’t been, really.

Granted, he was still miles short of his much-vaunted 2022/23 campaign — or indeed his 2019/20 effort which would equally have been a 30-plus-goal season were it not for the kibosh of injury — but Erik ten Hag had this term started to get something resembling a tune out of Rashford once more. Notwithstanding the fact that the bar hasn’t been so low in his entire lifetime, Rashford was quietly one of United’s more effective players before the Dutchman was shown the door.

Whatever about Rashford’s modest tally of seven goals in all competitions, anybody who watched Ten Hag’s side try to convert chances earlier this season would be within their rights to impress upon you that his three assists make for a deceptive statistic. He would have had eight or nine in the days when United saw use in employing a goal-scoring striker or two.

In the Premier League alone, Rashford has created 15 chances in his 15 appearances, third in United’s ranks behind Bruno Fernandes (39) and Amad Diallo (26). Four of those created by Rashford were classed as big chances (Fernandes has made nine, Diallo eight) — and yet the winger has only one league assist to his name.

Amorim was insistent on either side of United’s woeful performance against Newcastle that he will remain unbending in his ideological approach. But he will understand, now, if he didn’t already, that he has inherited a team of has-beens and never-gonna-bes.

If the Portuguese manager survives for the length of time required to shape a team in his image, surely only Lenny Yoro, Kobbie Mainoo, Amad Diallo and perhaps Manuel Ugarte would be worth salvaging from this wreckage.

But if United are to firstly steer clear of a fight for their very survival in the Premier League, Amorim’s first big compromise may be to reintegrate one of the very few players on his books who can actually stress an opposition defence or, say, find his man with a third of his crosses — which is incidentally well above the team average.

We know enough about Marcus Rashford at this point to know that he isn’t a Shedeur Sanders. He wasn’t built to carry a team on his back and he has routinely proven himself unwilling to bear that responsibility. This isn’t revisionism.

But it is increasingly starting to look like an emergency.