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Marcus Rashford on how Manchester United handled their challenging season’s beginning.
Marcus Rashford has revealed Erik ten Hag advised Manchester United to take a step back and focus on themselves after their rocky start to the season.
After losing 2-1 to Brighton on the first weekend of the season, United suffered a notorious 4-0 loss away at Brentford. However, those results are now a distant memory for a Red Devils team that has lost only three of its subsequent 18 league games and is flirting with a title challenge.
After those humiliating losses, Rashford has acknowledged that Ten Hag had to teach his team how to quit evaluating themselves in relation to their championship competitors and concentrate entirely on raising their own game.
“I think it starts with the belief,” he told Sky Sports. “I think it’s clear that we have the ability in the squad to go and win trophies and win the biggest games.
“We’ve shown even at our worst that we can beat the biggest teams. It’s not luck, ‘oh, they had a lucky day’. Other than last season, when we weren’t quite consistent with it, we’ve had good games against the best teams in the country.
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Some of those teams – [Manchester] City, Liverpool, Arsenal this season – they’re probably the best teams in Europe, they’re definitely in that conversation.
“It all starts with the belief. Winning games against those teams, it gives you that belief that you can go on and win trophies. You’re always competing with other teams, but we’ve almost had to take a step back and work on ourselves. That’s the manager’s mindset, and that’s the only way I’ve ever known how to improve your skillset. You can’t compare yourself to other people, you have to work on yourself, day in and day out. We’ve been doing that, we’ve shown improvement.
“Along the way, we’ve had some bad defeats. Usually, it would take us three or four games to completely bounce back, confidence-wise and results-wise. At times this season we’ve shown after bad results, we can not only come back and win the next game, we can go on a consecutive run of winning games. If you’re capable of doing that, then you’ll always be in and around the opportunity to win trophies.”
Since that disastrous start to the season, United has improved to fourth, just six points behind rival Manchester City in second and well in control of the race for a berth in the top four.