Martial is a millions miles away from being a genuine 30-goal-a-season striker

I WAS at Old Trafford the day Anthony Martial broke on to the scene against Liverpool and we all thought he was a wonderkid.

But in the four-and-a-half years since he arrived at Manchester United we’ve all had to revise our opinions.

He has very good ability, but will he be an all-time great goalscorer? No.

Is he the natural 30-goal-aseason striker we hoped he might be? No again.

He’s a 15-to-20-goal-aseason striker who will occasionally pop up with a lovely finish like he did at the weekend. But other times he will look surly, not in the mood and that can be massively frustrating.

I’ve listened to Ole Gunnar Solskjaer speak about him over the past week, a week which has seen him score different types of goals against Chelsea, Club Bruges and Watford. Sometimes it has been carrot and sometimes it has been stick as he tries to get the best out of him.

If I were his manager, I’d be telling Martial two things.

Firstly, that football is about smoke and mirrors, it’s how you promote yourself on the pitch.

I’d be showing him videos of himself and saying, ‘Look, you’ve scored there but you’ve had a little mope as you’ve walked back’, or, ‘You’ve been subbed and you’ve chucked your gloves to the floor’.

He is the kind of player who does those things and that can stick in people’s minds.

Take Dwight Yorke (above, far right) as an example. You all think of the big smile and of a man who loved football, don’t you?

But I played with Yorkie and he wasn’t always the big, happy-clappy, smiley bloke everyone thought – he could be a mardy beggar just like the rest of us.

So Martial needs to learn from people like Dwight and know that, if he looked like he was enjoying it a bit more, it would be half the battle won. I’d also be telling him and Marcus Rashford (below) that, while they are the future of the club, I would be getting a 25-to-30-goal-a-season striker in to help them out.

You would then have a pool of three to guarantee you a Sergio Aguero-esque goal return week after week, which would give young Mason Greenwood time to develop at his own pace, and all of that would only have a positive effect on United.

I was coming off the back of 50 goals in 60 games for Nottingham Forest when I joined Liverpool but I knew I wasn’t going to outscore Robbie Fowler, so I adapted my game. I wanted to create more chances, to drop off and run at people, and I see Martial more as that type of player than a Fowler, who was a classic, natural goal-poacher.

I would give him free rein to play on the left, right or in the hole and then when the main striker was injured, I’d be confident that Martial could do a job, having played and trained alongside the deadly newcomer and having learned from him.

It would be a win-win situation because the more the goals go in, for Martial and his team-mates, the easier he’d find it to smile as well.