Why Garry Monk should be manager of the year

THERE was a moment last summer when Garry Monk explained his pre- season reading list had moved on from the autobiographies of Sir Alex Ferguson and Harry Redknapp.

‘I’m now on Inverting the Pyramid — about football tactics,’ he said towards the end of a long interview with Sportsmail. ‘Just brushing up.’

He was joking but back then there were plenty who wondered if the Premier League’s youngest and most inexperienced manager was destined to be a footnote. ‘People probably expect me to fail,’ he said.

Today, it is hard to see how this 36-year-old who inverted so many opinions can be considered anything other than the manager of the year.

Swansea City’s win away at Arsenal on Monday made it four wins from four for Monk against Arsene Wenger and Louis van Gaal’s Manchester united; his wider impact has been a club record for Premier League points and the best pounds-for-points ratio of any manager in the top flight.

His method has not been to scrap all the work of Michael Laudrup — a man whose reign is too frequently disparaged — but there has been a deliberate return to the values that chairman Huw Jenkins said were being ‘eroded’.

At board and supporter level they call it The Swansea Way — they are words Monk had inscribed on a wall at the new training ground in Fairwood.

Beyond a requirement for attacking football, it also represents the philosophy that has helped Swansea punch so far above their weight. That principle calls for players to take responsibility for a club that was mired in bucket-rattling desperation barely a decade ago. When the squad started to look disinterested in February 2014 and Laudrup was sacked, Jenkins turned to Monk, a 10-year servant who knew what it was to climb through a hole in a fence and sneak on to a council pitch.

His key move, beside excellent signings such as Gylfi Sigurdsson and Lukasz Fabianski, has been to return a sense of responsibility into the players. The main buzzword in the Laudrup inquisitions was ‘intensity’, or the lack thereof. In its way, it was also an indictment of a squad whose components allowed themselves to go easy.

Much of what Monk has done behind the scenes has been to ensure that type of malaise cannot happen again. The details are numerous.

For instance, it was obvious on last season’s Europa League trips that cliques had developed within the squad. It was not uncommon to see Spaniards and Brits sitting apart at Cardiff Airport.

ONE of Monk’s first acts as caretaker manager was to ban agents and mobile phones from the training ground, ensuring faceto-face interaction, and to enforce that English was the prime language of communication.

At Fairwood this season, it is also telling that the players’ dining area sees the group eat around one big table. There are no smaller tables that might enable smaller groups and the under 21s eat with the first-team. On a wall is a big screen which, over lunch, shows footage from that morning’s sessions.

When the players head out to the pitches for drills, they are ordered to do so as a collective. ‘If you go out in dribs and drabs you get fined,’ a club source said. ‘Everything is done as a team.’

Crucially, the fines are almost entirely determined by the players, who later in the week are also given homework assignments on club iPads, containing scouting analysis of the opposition. It promotes the sort of responsibility that was being shirked previously; it creates the kind of self-policing loved by Monk, whose famous row with Chico Flores last season was caused by the latter breaking a squad rule on drinking fruit juice. Flores’ summer request to leave, along with Michu and Pablo Hernandez, was seen as a challenge. He acted on instinct to offload them and then called former boss Brendan Rodgers to discuss it. ‘I make my decision first and then call,’ Monk said.

Those calls are less and less but Monk is always on his phone. He self- imposes a one- hour nophone rule at home in the evening with his wife and three young children. When he started he slept one hour a night for days.

But now he is settling. The players call him Gaffer, not Monks, and hurdles such as Bafetimbi Gomis’s desire to leave have been overcome.

He used to say in his caretaker days that he had not earned the right to wear a suit. He has now.