He was quite poor in Mourinho's first season. But in the second he was easily our best left attacker (and our best attacker fullstop for a while). Then at the end of January we signed Sanchez, moved Martial out to the right for a couple of games (where he's never played well) and for the next 9 months he was mostly on the bench. When he did get a chance he was inconsistent and was bouncing between good and poor, but even that was better than Sanchez was performing. Finally in October (when Mourinho was about to be fired) Sanchez was dropped and Martial got a proper run again, and he was instantly our best attacker again.
Yes in a perfect world he would have been more consistent in those chances he got in those nine months, but it's hard to gain any consistency when you're pretty much guaranteed to be dropped for the next match no matter how well you play. Mourinho was an absolute idiot with his management in that situation, and he screwed over Martial, the team, the fans and ultimately himself because of it. If he'd played players on form instead of how much he liked them chances are we would have had better results and he would have stayed in the job longer than he did.
15/16 - played well
16/17 - started poor, got better as the season wore on
17/18 - played well, then wrongly dropped for no fault of his own
18/19 - played well, but missed a lot of games in the second half of the season because of illness and injury
19/20 - played well
20/21 - poor so far.
That's basically Martial's season wrap-up so far. The start of 16/17 and now this season are the only times he's actually played poorly when he's been getting consistent games. The rest of the time he generally hasn't been playing or has been in and out of the team through no real fault of his own. It's made his career look a lot more inconsistent than what he actually has been. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying he's been amazingly consistent or anything, but he hasn't been anywhere near as bad as many make out. For instance, up until this season he had been more consistent than Rashford over their careers here so far.
I don't mean that's he's the worst p a yer in the league or that sense.
I mean he's poor to the levels that this club desires.
Yesterday was dismal, but while you can say he was good here and there, look at the attack we had, it was awful and I'd still disagree.
Under Mourinho, it was very much, 1 good game, next bad game, good game, bad game. He was very, very inconsistent, which we let slide because he's young.
The same with Van Gaal's first season. He hit up like a house on fire when he arrived and then tailed off massively at the end.
Martial is perhaps a decent top 6 player, but we need a forward that matches the best in the league now if we want to challenge.
He's had his chance, and he's failed to take it. You can't have such an unreliable forward as your first choice.
A 33 year old forward has shown him up for sheer influence on a game ffs.