UTD PODCAST: HOW RASHFORD RAISED £20M FOR CHARITY

In the latest episode of UTD Podcast, Marcus Rashford tells us how he has helped to raise around £20 million for charity in recent weeks, to feed schoolchildren during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Due to social distancing, the 22-year-old appears alongside another United Academy product in Paul Scholes in a ‘from-home’ version of our usual series, to be released at 17:00 BST this evening.

During an insightful, hour-long chat with Scholesy and the rest of the gang, Marcus explains how his involvement with FareShare, a charity which distributes food to kids who would otherwise go without free school meals due to closures through lockdown, has led to donations snowballing in recent weeks.

Supermarkets have now become involved in the scheme, the forward says, enabling the organisation to increase the amount of supplies it hands out to children.

“Yeah, it’s done a lot better than what we thought,” Rashford admits in UTD Podcast. “It was a slow process at first and we set out to try and get to £100,000. A couple of days passed and we were way past that. A week passed, and the numbers just kept getting higher and higher.

“It got to the stage where we had a lot of donations, more than we expected, and we were actually struggling to deliver the food to people.

“So that’s where the bigger companies like Tesco, Co-op, Asda have come in and helped us with deliveries and that side of things, and their own large donations as well. So yeah, it’s definitely a big positive.

“I think it's just around £20 million now. It's a big number. At first, the donations were going kind of slow. I put a bit of money in myself, it was at like £50,000, £60,000 and then I just remember two days later it was at £140,000 and something.

“Then a few weeks after that it was £6 or £7 million when some of the bigger companies started coming in. Literally just two or three days ago it reached £20 million.”

With lockdown in the UK having been extended by the government for at least three more weeks, Marcus knows there is still a lot of work to be done, with his own childhood experiences continuing to inspire him to help others.

“We don't know how long this is going to go on for,” Marcus added. “If this would have happened 10 or 15 years ago, it definitely would have affected myself as a kid in the position I was in.

“It's just something I thought if there's a way to try and help people and kids especially, let's just try and do it.”

ONE ON ONE

Our trio of hosts couldn’t spent time with two of the most gifted players from United history, without asking them what it would have been like to have played with each other.

“It would have been a dream to play with someone like Paul,” says Marcus. “The biggest thing for me is range of passing. Probably the closest thing to that was when Wazza (Wayne Rooney) was playing a bit deeper and it was just so enjoyable to play as a number nine in those games, when he was playing in that position

“It was similar with Carras (Michael Carrick) as well. As soon as they get the ball, they look forward and want to play forward, not only to feet but in behind a lot of the time. As a forward that’s all you want. As long as someone is seeing the passes and trying to make them, that’s what you thrive on.”

As for Scholes, he says: “I would look for the same as any midfield player looks for - you look for a player who can come short, but more importantly a player with pace, like Marcus has with that speed and movement.

“You don’t need to look and these players, sometimes, you don’t need to talk to them either, it’s just sometimes just a little look, when you are on the ball, with time and space, you see space over a centre-half. I know I can just dink it over a centre-half or over a full-back, and he’s got the speed to fly past someone and the composure to score a goal as well.”