Garry Monk the Swansea workaholic could be made for the England job

They used to tell a story at Plymouth Argyle, going back to the days when Peter Shilton had been placed in charge of the team, that offers a little snapshot perhaps of how sometimes even the greats of the sport can lose their sheen once they dabble in the unforgiving world of football management.

Shilton was player-manager, or rather goalkeeper-manager, at the time. Plymouth were slipping into trouble in the old Third Division, the fingers of relegation closing round their necks for the second time in three years, and Shilton was trying to encourage his players to believe they could clamber away from the bottom three and rise like a “pheasant from the flames”.

After a slightly awkward silence, someone tentatively pointed out the word he might have been looking for was “phoenix”. Shilton, standing in front of his players as a double European Cup winner and the record England appearance-maker, paused for a few moments to take it in, the realisation dawning that his motivational speech had not gone quite as planned. He needed a line to reassert his authority. “I knew it began with an F,” he said.

The sport is littered with those kind of stories: managers who appear to have been employed because of what they achieved in their playing careers, rather than anything more substantial. Sometimes, it is chairmen or club owners being seduced by the idea of hiring one of the game’s A-listers. Or there are other times when it feels like a sentimental choice based on a player’s history at a club. More often than not, it is muddled thinking. Otherwise, Ossie Ardiles would have lasted longer than a year at Tottenham Hotspur and Stuart Pearce would still be pumping his fists at Nottingham Forest, to name but two.

But there are exceptions. No doubt many people suspected Swansea City might have been guilty of the same blurred judgment when Garry Monk was entrusted with the manager’s job 17 months ago. Monk was the club captain, a player who had been with them all the way on the journey through the leagues. His leadership qualities were clear but there was still the suspicion that Swansea’s chairman, Huw Jenkins, may have fallen into the trap that has caught so many others.

Looking back, perhaps those of us with reservations should have put more faith in the sensible working practices that are routinely employed at the Liberty Stadium. Monk has gone about his work with the intelligence and clarity that underpins everything at his club and, though it is easy sometimes in this business to make grand statements, it is also fair to say nobody fell off their chair in astonishment when Jonjo Shelvey floated the idea during an England press conference that Monk had already established himself, at the age of 36, as a credible successor for Roy Hodgson, whenever that time comes.

England’s current manager could conceivably be in his last nine months of employment and unless we get too hung up about Monk’s age – and it was never a problem for Walter Winterbottom – then, yes, it is time to recognise the Swansea manager deserves to be among those who feature uppermost in the FA’s thinking. How can he possibly not be given the shrewdness of his work and the growing feeling within the sport that he ticks all the relevant boxes to go to the top of his profession?