Marcus Rashford dedicated his England World Cup goals to a friend who recently died of cancer.
The Manchester United striker scored twice in the second half to help his team to a 3-0 win over Wales on Wednesday (29.11.22) and he revealed after the game in Qatar he had been dealing with a personal tragedy in the days leading up to the game.
After scoring, Marcus dropped to his knees and pointed at the sky, and explained it was a tribute to his pal Garfield Hayward.
He said: “I lost one of my friends a couple of days ago.
"He had quite a long battle with cancer. I’m pleased I scored for him, he's always been a big supporter of mine. He was just a great person and I'm pleased he came into my life, really.”
The 25-year-old sportsman switched flanks at half time, moving from the left to the right of Harry Kane and felt it put him in a better position to score.
He said: “I fancied one in the first half but to be fair the one in the second half was in a better position.
“From there it’s just about being calm and trying to execute what you do in training. They don’t go in often but it went in today.”
The win sent England into the last 16 at the top of their group and Marcus admitted he couldn't have been happier.
He said: “Moments like this, this is what we play football for, the biggest moments, the best moments and I’m really happy today with going through to the next round of the tournament.
“Hopefully we can now build on this tournament and I have massive ambition for this team. We can play better than we have shown tonight.
“It’s obviously good to qualify. It was a little bit disappointing for the team after the game against the USA, I thought we could have played a lot better. The only way to bounce back from that is to have a good performance in your next game and I thought in the first half we defended really good and they didn’t have many opportunities - I think they had one shot - and it was just about us killing the game off and taking the chances when they came.
“At half-time the manager said we were playing really well but the one thing we could work better on was having shots on target, we only had two or three in the first half. We wanted to work the goalkeeper more, we wanted to keep getting into dangerous positions. We didn’t finish them in the first half but thankfully we did in the second half.”
