Manchester United forward Marcus Rashford, who had sustained a back injury in January before the 2019-20 season was suspended due to the global outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, has said that he was recovering well from the injury during the lockdown period.

“Yeah it’s good,” Marcus replies, when asked how he’s getting on. “Obviously, I need to step it up a little bit now, but it’s difficult to do with not being in the training ground,” Rashford said in the latest edition of United podcast as quoted on the official website of the club.

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“I’ve just added a few bits and pieces – I’m pushing myself on the bike, and doing more core work and upper body, so just day-by-day really, taking it slow. It’s difficult. Obviously you can train at the training ground every day and that’s the peak of your fitness. To try to emulate that at home, it’s almost impossible.

“Everyone’s just trying to get as close as they can to that. Some of the lads have been out running every day and have programmes from the club. But even doing that, running [5,000 or 6,000 metres], maybe it’s more than what you’d run in the training session, but it’s not the same spike in intensity. So it’s difficult to try to mirror that,” the 22-year-old said.

Had it not been a lockdown and normal time prevailed, Rashford believed he would have come back to the United first-team and possibly set his eye on Euro 2020 at the end of the season.

However, he admitted that coming back to first-team football at the end of the April would have been a push and the lockdown has provided him with the adequate time to regain his fitness completely.

“Yeah, you know, for me, I was probably going to go back with the team towards the middle or end of April,” he adds. “But that would have been a push, obviously, because I didn’t want to miss the summer.

“I doubt I would have been 100-per-cent fit going into that tournament or even finishing off the season, but that’s what we were aiming for.

“Obviously, since then, a lot’s happened with this virus so, for my body really, it’s been good to give it its full duration to rest,” the England international said.