Manchester United manager Erik ten Hag has already explained how lucky he is to have a "specific scoring trainer" in first-team coach Benni McCarthy working with the club's forward players, including Marcus Rashford.
The arrival of the former Blackburn Rovers and West Ham United striker in late July has coincided with Rashford enjoying the best goalscoring season of the player's eight years as a professional. After scoring twice against Leicester City last weekend, the 25-year-old scored his 23rd and 24 goals of the campaign across all competitions, which eclipses the previous high from the 2019/20 season while Ole Gunnar Solskjær was still in charge.
Coincidentally, 24 is the same tally that McCarthy scored during his debut season in England after swapping Portugal for Lancashire, also his most successful season in front of goal in the country. Rashford now needs just one more goal to top his coach's career-best goalscoring season, which came while playing for Porto across the 2003/04 season when he hit 25, two of which came against United as Jose Mourinho's side sent them out of the Champions League at the first knockout round stage en route to lifting the trophy.
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McCarthy's return to Manchester 20 years later was praised by Ten Hag when asked by supporters about the player-turned-coach's influence as of a question and answer session with supporters, which was later published on the club's website. "In our coaching staff, we had a lot of defenders and midfield players," the manager explained.
Ten Hag played primarily as a central defender during his playing days in the Netherlands and also as a defensive midfielder on occasion. Assistant coaches Mitchell van der Gaag and Steve McClaren were also defenders and midfielders, respectively.
Darren Fletcher, the club's first-team coach-cum-technical director, played more than 300 matches in midfield for United across 13 seasons, while fellow senior coach Eric Ramsay comes from an academic background with no professional playing career of note.
For Ten Hag, striking that balance amongst his staff was something to address. "I wanted also to find a good balance," the manager continued. "[McCarthy] is offensive [minded] as he is a former striker, and that is also a really specific job task in the team. I never played there, so I’m lucky to have someone in my staff who played there.
"Football is about scoring, and you have a goalkeeping specialist (at United, that's goalkeeping coaches Richard Hartis and Craig Mawson), but you also have offensive specialists, and, in particular, we have a specific scoring trainer.
"He has to add that, in details, working and for the rest of us, he has a relationship to all the players in our squad. He also has to work on the togetherness, and he is doing a great job on that."
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