Give up on him? Well, it ultimately depends on how we want to play.
For instance, the manager said in his presser yesterday that our main problem up front was that we didn't attempt enough runs in-behind. The truth is that, if you want to see runs in-behind, you don't start Martial up front. Then you think about it a bit more and you start to scratch your head because, in Solskjaer's system, the lead forward looks at his absolute best when he operates in the spaces between the lines and allows Bruno and co. to get in the box. But, apparently, we crave for Haaland, whose main asset is that he attacks the box like a bull. But when we had Lukaku to make these runs, we chose to play with Lingard as a false #9. What do we want from the man spearheading the attack?
I'll admit i'm not Martial's biggest fan. I don't think he's lazy or that he lacks application. And i certainly don't think he's that soft to always need pampering and a pat on the back. What i've always thought is that his case is a classic one of a player whose football intelligence doesn't match his technical abilities. It's frustrating because he has the ability for combination plays, but his off the ball movement and his positioning leave a lot to be desired. When the options are there for him (either acres of space with runners left and right or plenty of players around him to link-up with), he can set the world on fire. When he has to strive for pockets of space, he just drifts from the CF position to the left half-space aimlessly. Or rather, it stops being an aimless stroll whenever Shaw, Pogba and a midfielder overload the left side to allow Martial time on the ball and to give him options to pick from. It comes as no surprise that his best period at the club was during project restart when we enjoyed spells of good possession in the attacking half and we managed to get many players around the box.
United's attackers (the three and the one in our 4231) may have different individual qualities, but they all share one thing: They thrive on directness and instinct. We have bags of quality up front which allow us to outperform our xG, but we are not clever enough. We score great goals, beautiful goals, but we don't score the "easy" goals very often. And that's why we cry out for Cavani with his tonnes of experience to start. Despite him probably not being the prototypical Solskjaer forward. In this sense, if our expectation is to turn Martial into this player who will be able to spot the overloads and time his runs to perfection in order to create opportunities for him and his teammates out of nothing, because he "looks like" a silky player with good dribbling and link-up skills, we should cut our losses short and look elsewhere for that player.