Garry Monk started as an associate schoolboy with Watford, where he made a lasting impression on the Youth-team coach, Kenny Jackett. That view was not shared by the manager, Glenn Roeder, who allowed Garry to join Third Division Torquay, where he soon attracted the attention of Premiership Southampton who brought him to The Dell, aged 18, to join the trainees.

He made his Saints debut as a centre-back in 1998-99 and was selected three more times by Dave Jones that season.

Over the next four seasons, though, he was ever on the verge of a breakthrough into the first team that never materialised.

Throughout this period, Claus Lundekvam was the lynchpin in the middle of the defence, generally partnered by one of Ken Monkou, Dean Richards, Paul Williams, Tahar El Khalej and Michael Svensson.

Garry could also play at full-back and did so, deputising for Jason Dodd, in the last two League games at The Dell, those climactic wins v Manchester United and Arsenal.

During his Southampton career, he went on loan to five different clubs.  The last of these resulted in a permanent move to Barnsley. The curse of being injured when a club changes managers struck Garry at Oakwell, but Kenny Jackett, newly installed as manager at Swansea City, came to the rescue. And when the Swans’ captain, Roberto Martinez, took over from Jackett as manager, he appointed Garry as his captain. Garry played in the final season at The Vetch before the club moved to the Liberty Stadium.

In 2011-12, he was part of a Premier League defence that was put together for less than £1m, in a squad assembled for under £10m. Although he didn’t start at Wembley when Swansea won the Capitol One Cup in 2013, he came on in the second half and, as club captain, jointly received, with skipper Ashley Williams, the Swans’ first major trophy. If that was a highlight of a Swansea career spanning more than 200 League games, Garry considers the whole experience to be “a dream come true.” A football cliché maybe, but surely acceptable, given Garry’s patient struggle to get established.

Ex-Saint Alan Curtis, assistant to a succession of Swansea managers, assessed Garry as “a model professional, a huge leader on and off the pitch, an adopted Swansea Jack” (an honourable title derived from a local hero of the 1930s, a labrador dog who executed a major rescue at sea). The man himself readily acknowledges the grounding in the game he received at Southampton. He left the club in February 2004, as the side that had reached the 2003 Cup Final slid out of the Premier League’s top half and went into free-fall – for the next nine years. A good time to go, you might say – although Garry himself has just a tinge of regret that he did not move on a couple of seasons earlier.

In January 2014, when Swansea ditched Michael Laudrup Garry became their caretaker manager and then got the job permanently in the May. Since then he has moved on to take four more managerial appointments in five years, most of which have resulted in falling outs with his chairmen which suggests Garry Monk is a man who very much knows his own mind and is not afraid of speaking it. However he was powerless to stop the Sheffield Wednesday chairman showing him the door in November 2020 after an inauspicious start to the season.