Marcus Rashford

[Rustin Cohle]

[Sméagol]

[SAF_Legend]

Good lad.

[Sméagol]

Lad's a legend.

[Kojak]

When I grow up I want to be just like Marcus Rashford.

[gdmm]

Marcus Rashford; more of a man of the people, than all the taxpayer funded MPs combined.

[smithy2]

Well done Marcus but I’m just sad it’s come to this. We need to end this decade of shit from the Tories.

[Deleted]

Oct 23, 2020 19:49:50 GMT smithy2 said:

Well done Marcus but I’m just sad it’s come to this. We need to end this decade of shit from the Tories.

Yep he's been brilliant but the fact what's happened today was necessary is appalling. The attitude of some, aiming digs at him on social media just about sums this bunch of wretched wankers up.

[smithy2]

Oct 23, 2020 20:18:51 GMT fergiegiveusawave said:

Oct 23, 2020 19:49:50 GMT smithy2 said:

Well done Marcus but I’m just sad it’s come to this. We need to end this decade of shit from the Tories.

Yep he's been brilliant but the fact what's happened today was necessary is appalling. The attitude of some, aiming digs at him on social media just about sums this bunch of wretched wankers up.

Oh you know it’s coming. The daily mail crowd will be after him soon enough.

[Sméagol]

[johnboy14]

[Ole's Red Whiteknight03 Army]

Oct 23, 2020 20:47:51 GMT smithy2 said:

Oct 23, 2020 20:18:51 GMT fergiegiveusawave said:

Yep he's been brilliant but the fact what's happened today was necessary is appalling. The attitude of some, aiming digs at him on social media just about sums this bunch of wretched wankers up.

Oh you know it’s coming. The daily mail crowd will be after him soon enough.

And they’ve proven themselves to be the wretched wankers that they are. Man makes millions by being better at football than the rest of us are, and then acts better than the rest of us would, and we’re expected to piss all over him? Yeah, ok. *eye roll* *two fingers up.*

[Sméagol]

[Rustin Cohle]

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/marcus-rashford-and-alex-ferguson-team-up-to-stop-the-poor-going-hungry-q0rdp8rd0

Marcus Rashford and Alex Ferguson team up to stop the poor going hungry

SPOILER: Click to show

Marcus Rashford is the football superstar and poverty campaigner who at the age of 23 has already forced the government into two U-turns on free school meals and raised millions of pounds for charity while also playing for Manchester United and England.



Sir Alex Ferguson is widely regarded as one of the best British football managers of all time who during his 26 years with Manchester United won a record 38 trophies, including 13 premier league titles and five FA cups.

Rashford was awarded an MBE last month for services to vulnerable children. Ferguson, who is 78, was knighted in 1999 for his contribution to sport. Both overcame extraordinarily tough backgrounds to reach the top.



They are footballing legends, representing the past and the future of the game. Interviewing them together is like being granted an audience with both the Queen and Prince William. In fact, it is probably of greater interest to more people. After the interview, Rashford tweeted: “I had the best conversation with Sir Alex today. I’m in awe of this man.” By the following morning, his tweet had received more than 100,000 likes.

The two men have come together to support The Times and Sunday Times Christmas appeal which is raising money for the poverty and food waste charity FareShare. We spoke to them on a conference call from their separate lockdown bubbles.



Rashford still remembers the first time he saw his hero when he was a young boy in the Manchester United Academy. “We were watching the first team doing a gym session. He was stood up on the balcony and he told us to make sure we were watching and learning. I must have been about ten years old.” Ferguson spotted Rashford as soon as he joined the club at the age of seven. “He was what we would consider one of the better potentials coming through the system.”



What has impressed the former manager most is the striker’s commitment to the vulnerable. Rashford’s campaigning has already helped FareShare to provide two million meals a week to those in need. Now, inspired by this achievement, Ferguson and his friend Sir Michael Moritz, the billionaire philanthropist, are pledging £2 million to “match fund” donations that are made to the charity in the run-up to Christmas, meaning any money that Times readers give will be doubled.



“You have to be shocked at the number of people who are in need of food,” Ferguson says. “Marcus has opened the eyes of everyone in Britain. The work he’s done has been fantastic and we’re all so proud of him because of that.”



Rashford’s impact this year has been phenomenal. While some Premier League players spend their millions on fast cars and designer clothes, he has used his celebrity to raise public awareness of deprivation in Britain. Some Tory MPs accused him of “virtue-signalling on Twitter” and complained that he should stick to football but one recent poll found that more people think that Rashford has been an effective leader during the pandemic than either the prime minister or the Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer. “It’s not political at all, it’s just about what’s best for kids and, looking forward, what you would change from your own childhood,” he says.

When Rashford got a back injury in January, instead of distracting himself playing video games he decided to take up this cause. “I had time to think about what’s the best way possible of helping these kids and giving families a chance of becoming successful and living their dreams,” he explains. “I went into it, finding out the facts and figures about how many people are in need.”



The campaign really stepped up in June, when the government refused to give food vouchers over the summer holidays to those on free school meals. Eventually, under pressure from Rashford, Boris Johnson backed down. The footballer then called for meals to be provided over the October half-term.



More than a million people signed a petition and again the government caved in. Even Rashford seems slightly surprised by how effective he has been. “It was my dream to become a footballer and you don’t think about the fame and the people that would listen to you just because you played football so I wouldn’t say I expected it,” he says, modestly.



Ferguson wishes more sporting figures would follow Rashford’s example. “Footballers in Britain are certainly high profile. There’s no reason why they can’t use that profile in a good way,” he says. “What Marcus has done is he’s led the way . . . People will say, ‘That boy he’s only 23 years of age’. People who are in their later ages . . . should be saying, ‘I can do something’.”

Like many in his generation, Rashford is more comfortable on Twitter than in a town hall. “Everybody can think that social media is a bad place, but this is just one example where it’s been used for good,” he says. Thousands of businesses, councils and individuals have flooded his timeline with offers of food for hungry children. “It definitely showed that people have an ambition to stop the problem.”

FareShare tackles both poverty and food waste by taking surplus food that would otherwise be discarded by farms, factories, restaurants and retailers. FareShare then distributes it to charities that turn it into meals for those who cannot afford to eat, helping needy children and adults at school breakfast clubs, homeless shelters, lunch clubs for older people and women’s refuges. Normally, unsold or “wonky” crops are ploughed back into the earth, surplus meat and dairy products are consigned to landfill and mis-labelled packaged goods are thrown out. FareShare helps producers with a contribution towards the cost of harvesting or saving the food.



For both Rashford and Ferguson this is personal. Rashford can still remember the feeling of going hungry as a child when he was growing up in the Wythenshawe district of Manchester. His mother, Melanie, had five children to feed and there was very little money. “I know what the feeling is like of going hungry and I don’t want anyone else to experience it,” he says.



“I’m probably one of the more privileged ones because I had something else to focus on. I wanted to become a footballer and every day I would be out practising so my mind was occupied on something else. But I know that for some other people whatever they dream of being is so out of reach they can’t actually do anything day-to-day so it’s always at the front of their mind.” Football was his way to escape. “It’s when I moved out of my house I realised how bad a position we were in . . . it was like a fresh start for me.”

It infuriates him that there is still a sense of shame about being on free school meals. “I was lucky in my community,” he says. “There were a lot of children that were in a similar situation so I met a lot of friends through things like after-school clubs and breakfast clubs, but I feel like there is stigma in a lot of cases. People feel embarrassed and ashamed to have to go to those types of programmes.”



His mother worked as hard as she could, but it was still impossible to make ends meet. “Everybody feels protective towards their mum,” Rashford says.



“I’ve obviously seen her go through things that children shouldn’t really see, but it’s turned me into a stronger person and I’m definitely closer to her. If it was tough for me and my brothers and my sisters, I just can’t imagine the stress that was on her at the time. And honestly she did so well to hide it because she was always happy when we were at home.” Often, she would go hungry so that the children could eat. “When I look back there were a lot of times when me and my brothers and my sisters would be waiting for her to finish work and then when she [got] home she would make the food and we would ask her, ‘Are you not going to eat?’ and she would say, ‘No’. I was obviously young at the time. I thought maybe she ate when she was out but a lot of the time she used to give us the meals that she should have been eating. For someone who was working from 9 [in the morning] until 8 or 9 o’clock at night every day to not be eating isn’t good for her own wellbeing so it was a tough situation that we were in. But now that we are on the other side of that I think it’s important — and she’s passionate about it as well — to try and help people who are in the same situation.”

Ferguson’s childhood was equally hard. He grew up in a tenement block in the Govan district of Glasgow. There were nine families in a three-storey house with a zinc bath in the kitchen, but he remembers fondly the strong sense community. “My mother and father worked all their life in order for us to progress, my brother and I . . . Sometimes I wish I could rewind and go back again because that was a special time,” he says. “My parents taught me many things that have stayed with me all my life — don’t lie, don’t be late, work hard, respect your elders. With nine families you were so close. No one locked their doors because they trusted each other, it was more of a big, big family. There were some families with eight, nine kids . . . It was a fantastic period for me.”



His life now is very different but he never wants to put his childhood behind him. “You can’t forget your upbringing because that’s what’s made me,” he says. “I remember reading in a newspaper article, ‘Alex Ferguson’s done well despite coming from Govan’. It’s because I came from Govan that I did well. It’s because the family I had made sure the food was on the table . . . I’m sitting here in my nice house and I don’t have to struggle for anything but I think it’s good to have a struggle. It’s good to fight for something to get out of. People who came from these working-class areas of Glasgow had to work hard to get out of it.”

Ferguson thinks the bad times he had as a child fuelled the drive that carried him forward in later years. “I’m proud of what I’ve achieved in my life, I’m proud of my sons and my grandchildren how they’ve progressed and developed,” he says. “That all goes back to how I was brought up and the background I had and the success I’ve had is a lot to do with that.”



Rashford is also convinced that early struggles made him a better person. “When I was younger I knew I wanted to be a footballer purely for the love of the game but if there was another reason it was to get my family out of the situation that we were in.” Now that commitment to his family has grown into a determination to show other children that there is a way out. “I want them to understand that there’s no reason why they can’t do [something] just because of where they come from.”

We ask Ferguson what advice he would give Rashford. “He should be giving me some advice because what he’s doing at 23 is fantastic for a young person,” he replies. “I’ve no need to tell Marcus because I think there’s humility in the way he lives his life. His feet are on the ground. These are great qualities to carry you through life. Football hasn’t changed him. There is a danger in football that it can change people, money can change people, stardom can change people. Getting a celebrity position in life can sometimes be a problem because not everyone can carry success well. And at the moment Marcus is doing that very, very well.”

[Rustin Cohle]

Rashford won’t run out of steam as early as Rooney did, and he’s playing wide as well.