Could Gabriel Jesus and Marcus Rashford Be Manchester's Main Men Next Season?

Gabriel Jesus' right forearm tells his story, the past given permanence in ink. A young Jesus, bare of foot and chest, looks up at the sprawling favela of his neighbourhood Jardim Peri with a football tucked under his arm.

If a boy with just a ball and a dream sounds more saccharine than simply sweet, it has not been done justice. As tattoos go, it's rather touching. His friend Neymar has an almost identical one down his calf. 

The journey from poverty to prosperity is often painted as being one of escape; circumstance to be scaled as an inmate might a prison wall. Jesus was probably too busy with a ball to contextualise his own experience in such a haughty manner. To him, Jardim Peri, the tough region on the outskirts of Sao Paolo, was simply home.

"If I could, I'd take the entire Peri Garden neighbourhood to form a Jardim Peri in Manchester," he said on his arrival in England, per the Daily Mirror's Jack Rathborn. 

It was there on dry clay or concrete pitches he would endlessly play "varzea," the Brazilian version of street football that makes men of boys and boys of men that come up against boys like Jesus.

"They go into tackles to break your leg," he recalled, per FIFA's official website. That answers the old "can he handle it on a cold Tuesday night in Stoke" conundrum. 

In those early years, it was obvious to anyone who saw him play he had been blessed with a God-given talent of the type that sends atheists flocking to church.

Deeply devout himself—with a name like Gabriel Jesus, he was never likely to be a Richard Dawkins man—on joining Manchester City he choose to wear No. 33 for its religious significance: the age Jesus died on the cross.

His nickname in the favela was "Tetinha," which apparently relates to his repeated claims as a child that football is a simple game. Google Translate went with "little d--k" when I tried some independent research, so it's probably best to go with the original interpretation.

It was no idle boast in any case, with Jesus scoring 37 in 27 games in his first season for Palmeiras' youth team in the under-17 State Championships. 

Between making his first-team debut for Palmeiras in March 2015 and joining Manchester City, he helped his side to their first league title since 1994, was voted best newcomer in the Brazilian championship and established himself as first choice for the national side. No shrinking violet, he's going to want to start next season as first choice at City.

Saturday's victory over Leicester City saw Jesus do the business on the pitch, while God looked on crestfallen from the sidelines. Sergio Aguero on the substitutes' bench wore the look of a teenager who had just walked in on his parents engaged in carnal deeds. It's two parts disgust and one part incredulity that anyone could ever imagine such a thing as being a good idea in the first place. It's probably not how he would have chosen to celebrate five years to the day since scoring that goal against Queens Park Rangers.

If Marcus Rashford was to do justice to the scale of the estate where he grew up in Wythenshawe, he would have to instruct his tattooist to start at his lower back and work all the way up to the nape of his neck. Inner-city Manchester may be salubrious compared to a favela, but it's probably no less tough. It rains a lot more, too. 

Although a graduate of Manchester United's academy, Rashford is English football's finest street footballer since Wayne Rooney.

Last month, in his first major interview with a national newspaper, he told The Telegraph's James Ducker how 14 months on from scoring on both his European and Premier League debuts—acts that kickstarted a career even he must be struggling to keep pace with—he still gets the urge to take a ball onto the streets with his mates:

"You want to play football all the time. Why change? One hundred per cent I view myself as a street footballer.

"We used to play everywhere when I was a kid. Parking lots over the road, the number of times we got told to come off the school field when school wasn't open …

"If we could we'd still do all those same things, but it's a bit more difficult now. We still go to a quiet field every now and then, though, but the opportunities are a little less. Even at home I'm always getting that urge to go out and play football. Playing with my brothers, in the garden, in the house, anywhere."

Like Rashford, Jesus tends to reference his family a lot. Both one of four siblings, the pair were brought up by single mothers in strong matriarchal families. Jesus' telephone celebration after every goal is a reference to the close contact he keeps with his mother, who along with two of his brothers and two close friends moved with him to Manchester.

"Yes, it's true that my mother has a go at me when I don't track back," he told Alfredo Spalla in an interview with The Guardian. She'll be Pep Guardiola's assistant before too long. 

While it's increasingly difficult to romanticise a game where an agent can make £41 million from a single transfer (Mino Raiola presumably had all three sides of the Paul Pogba deal covered so he could make the space in the middle the Bermuda bit where the money disappears), Rashford wandering the streets looking for a quiet field to play in is an image of singular beauty. It needs to be painted in rich oils and hung in Manchester's Whitworth Art Gallery. Or better still, mass-produced and handed to every kid in Manchester.

One was under the impression every Premier League player must have been a street footballer at one point, until jarred by Rashford's words singling himself out as being something different, I started to take note of how many kids were out playing in the street. I'll let you know when I spot one.

Going into the weekend, Aguero had scored 13 goals in his past 14 matches. For the second time running he was left out for a game City desperately needed to win, especially now Arsenal have finally turned up to the party, sober and focused, at the time in the season when prior to the weekend everyone else had started to look a little half cut, shouty, slightly delirious and capable of doing something they might just regret.

That Jesus is even allowed into the same ring as Aguero says much about the confidence his fleeting performances have engendered in those around him, not least of all Guardiola.

With fewer than 100 professional appearances to his name, there was something gloriously precocious about the way he strode up to Yaya Toure after City were awarded a first-half penalty, before taking the ball clean off the Ivorian. One of the club's greatest-ever players was left staring down at the empty void between his hands where the ball should have been, or at the very least a cake to mark his 34th birthday.

He was still contemplating which absence he was most upset about when Jesus was doing a celebration samba dance only lithe 20-year-old Brazilians can get away with. Prior to finding the corner of Kasper Schmeichel's goal, he had given the Leicester goalkeeper the eyes to such an unnerving extent the Dane must have wondered whether the striker was in possession of a glass pair.

Five goals (from seven shots on target) and two assists in just six Premier League starts is some going, especially given Jesus is coming back from a three-month lay-off. For a 20-year-old kid in what has been a stop-start first campaign in England, he looks some player.

Still, there was a couple of times in his play when he failed to be where Aguero on the touchline will have known he would have been. At one point, Leroy Sane worked a yard down the left and shaped in a cross that needed a run to the near post that was so obvious it could not have been clearer had Aguero worked his way into the right position wearing a giant sandwich board with a big pointy arrow. Both Jesus and Raheem Sterling checked their runs for a pullback they are still waiting for.

"I haven't been able to deliver and to show my real technique and what I can do," was the player's verdict post-match, per the club's official website. "But I am very well physically. I understand the game, Pep's vision and my position."

If this is Jesus at half-mast, next season will be interesting with a full pre-season behind him. 

A core principle of Guardiola's methodology is the idea his forwards are his best defenders. Ian Rush would have been his ideal striker. Aguero can finish like Rush, but he doesn't work like him.

"You know that when their defenders have three or four seconds [to find a player] then the ball will be good," explained Guardiola, per Sky Sports' Adam Bate, when discussing the importance of the first press. "When the strikers are the best defenders and the defenders are the best players in the buildup, then you are a strong team."

Now either Palmeiras coach Alexi "Cuca" Stival—who moved Jesus from wide left under his predecessors to play him through the middle to the tune of 11 goals in 18 league games—has doctored the reference he wrote for Jesus, or Guardiola has at his disposal a forward who will make him happier than the birth of a first child. 

"I think it's a waste leaving him out wide," Cuca explained to The Independent's Jack Lang. "He has so much energy, so much vitality. He likes covering the whole pitch. He runs a lot and likes to win the ball back from opponents. 

"This is great for a coach. He brings the whole team forward with him. If he plays on the wing, his work will be more restricted. Part of his enormous potential is the ability to run all over the pitch."

His other referees aren't too shabby either.

"He is going to be our next great No. 9," said Pele, per Sky Sports' Nick Wright, after his five goals in six starts for Brazil put their South American World Cup qualifying campaign back on track after a stuttering start. In 2016, he scored more goals for his country than Neymar, who he became particularly close to when team-mates for Brazil's under-23 side that won Olympic Gold for the first time in their history in 2016.

"I look at Gabriel and see myself in the past," said Ronaldo, per the Manchester Evening News' Rob Pollard, which as compliments go, as a Brazilian footballer, is pretty much as good as it gets. 

Guardiola must feel like Princes Leia when she's split between Han Solo and Luke Skywalker. In Aguero's defence, and it feels like there's less need to mount one given the fact the Argentinian is obviously bloody brilliant, he has the best goals-per-minute ratio in Premier League history and is still just 28.

In fairness he has visibly upped his work rate since Guardiola's appointment, too, but it might not be enough.

When he presses, it feels like watching someone on their best behaviour trying to get through a meal with the in-laws. It's all a bit forced, as though at any minute he could shout "sod this" before throwing a plate against the dining room wall like Kevin Spacey's character in American Beauty. Guardiola would say nothing, leaving his eyes to transmit a message to the fourth official to get the substitution board prepped.

"Aguero is a sensational player, but you can see already that Pep Guardiola is taking this more in the direction of the team he wants," Gary Neville said on recent co-commentary duty for Sky Sports. "Maybe Aguero isn't quite a fit for him."

A notoriously bad trainer, Aguero apparently regularly morphs into Clark "frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn" Gable in Gone with the Wind when pulled up on his timekeeping, at least according to Frank Lampard.

"Aguero picked up a fair few (fines). He just didn't care. He was so laid back and would just stroll out to the training pitch like five minutes late," Lampard recalled on Soccer AM (h/t the Daily Mail's Anthony Hay), at the back end of last year.

"[The coaches would say] 'right you're fined' and he would say 'OK, no problem. Wait until the weekend and I'll score a hat-trick and everyone will be happy.'"

That won't be enough to keep Guardiola happy. Surely for the perfectionist, complacency is the greatest sin. Here's a man who by his own admission locks himself away in private bunkers for an indecent amount of time to study the opposition and work out tactical theorems.

No wonder he's always squinting in interviews, Saturday is probably the only day of the week he sees daylight.

"I can't put my mind to anything else. I'm not interested in hanging out or partying," Guardiola Jesus has said in the past, per FIFA's official website, in a statement that must be like aural gold to a football manager.

"For me, it's all about the pitch: training, playing. Even when I go home it's football the whole time. I think I'm obsessed."

At Manchester United, on paper, the path currently looks clear for Rashford to underline his status as Jose Mourinho's first choice centre-forward, given Zlatan Ibrahimovic's long-term injury and likelihood the Swede will not be offered fresh terms at Old Trafford.

However, and it's a however as big as the Ritz, the great unknown is whom Mourinho will target over the summer. The Portuguese will almost certainly meet finishing sixth with a spending spree Liberace would probably think over the top and ostentatious.

Given the 52 goals United have scored in the league is two fewer than Bournemouth, a centre-forward will be Mourinho's primary target. Rashford being wrapped in cotton wool in the lead-up to the Europa League final says much about how Mourinho has been won around by a player who spent the majority of the season wide left, prior to his virtuoso performance against Arsenal through the middle. It's a position he has since cemented in Ibrahimovic's absence.

With a smile as big as his talent, only those with a stony blue heart could not want him to do well. Against Celta Vigo on Thursday, again he was United's main man, just as he was in the first leg when his sublime free-kick settled matters in Spain.

Rashford has become a catalyst for this United side, a leader at 20. For all Anthony Martial's ability, it is Rashford of the two of them who looks closer to being a £50 million centre-forward. Rooney's swan song has yet to be officially sung, but it's an open secret the club has asked Stereophonics frontman Kelly Jones to keep his diary free over the next few weeks.

On BT Sport punditry duty last week (via the Metro's Ewan Roberts), former Manchester United striker Michael Owen expressed reservations over whether Rashford could score "30-odd goals a season," which seems a little harsh given over the course of his own career the Ballon d'Or winner never once scored "30-odd goals a season" either.

Rashford's late miss after coming off the bench in United's 2-1 defeat to Tottenham Hotspur in the last-ever game at White Hart Lane on Sunday will likely only solidify Mourinho's plans. As a rule, football fans love spending their chairman's money, but there's a fair few Old Trafford regulars that would happily see Rashford and Martial duke it out to play through the middle next season, potentially free from the omnipresent shadow cast by Ibrahimovic.

Is it inconceivable Manchester United and Manchester City could start next season with a pair of 20-year-olds as their first-choice centre-forwards? Ibrahimovic and Aguero can boast 514 league goals between them; Rashford and Jesus just 31.

Alas, as Ernest Hemingway wrote in A Farewell to Arms: "No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful." 

Mourinho will spend until told to stop over the summer. Rashford will almost certainly have to wait for his chance through the middle.

It's less clear-cut at City. In this age of asseveration, the clamour in these type of debates is always to pronounce firmly in favour of one way or the other. The truth, however, pretty much universally occupies the murky grey space between any two strands of thought.

In all likelihood, Jesus and Aguero will both play major roles, even if Guardiola will probably use them only fleetingly in tandem. The former will just as likely be used half the time as cover on either flank when Sane and Sterling suffer either a dip in form or injury.

The only real certainty is that every goal scored by either Jesus or Rashford will be met with a glut of comparisons to the other, invariably unflattering. It's all par for course for United and City supporters, but for the rest of us, it's worth remembering the Mark Twain adage: "Comparison is the death of joy."

For once, let's just enjoy two brilliant young footballers.