Notes from the Habbin: Monk-ey business
Notes from the Habbin: Monk-ey business
Garry on the comeback trail.
The last few years have been notoriously difficult for the name Gary.
Once a commonly heard moniker up and down England, its popularity declined to such an extent in the last decade that only 28 babies called Gary were born in the UK in 2015.
But now it seems Gary is back in fashion, and according to The Mirror (I know, but bear with me on this) was a “trending name” for babies in 2023 as new parents looked to “classic Gen X names" for their little ones.
As Gary hits the comeback trail, a Garry is also making an unlikely return, with Garry Monk unveiled on Monday as Cambridge United’s third permanent head coach of the season.
The former Swansea manager has been out of football since 2020, but is back in the game and tasked with keeping the U’s clear of the League One relegation zone.
Out of the frying pan, into the friar
Given some of the names banded around for the United job since the departure of Neil Harris, Monk feels like a reasonable appointment. His career hasn’t exactly been on an upward trajectory since he first burst onto the scene at Swansea, but his record is not horrendous and his average points-per-game from any of his previous jobs, if repeated over the last 11 games of this season, would probably be enough to see us safe.
Despite this, the appointment still feels significantly more risky than that of Harris.
This is partly because of the situation we’re in: there are only 11 games to go, so the margin for error is small. I’m not too worried about this, as I’m pretty confident the squad is good enough to just about stay up this season regardless of who is in the dugout, but the stakes are undoubtedly much higher than they were when Mark Bonner was sacked with more than half a season - and a transfer window - lying ahead.
Part of it is also that Monk has never managed in League One before, and has been out of the game for a not-insignificant amount of time. Will he be able to hit the ground running? And even if he does, will his methods be effective with what will surely be the least talented group of players he has ever had at his disposal?
With Harris it felt like we knew what we were getting; the football wouldn’t be pretty, but it would likely be effective enough to get us the 50+ points we needed. And for the most part this turned out to be the case. Can we be confident the same thing is true of Monk? I guess we’ll soon find out.
Will Monk bring good Abbey habits?
But if we come through the immediate period unscathed, I’m optimistic our ceiling under Monk is higher than it would have been under Harris. We were always going to be a team of battlers with the latter in charge, whereas you would think that, having managed at the highest level, Monk will try and implement a slightly more progressive style when given the chance to remodel the squad over the summer.
And while I don’t expect us to go full Swansea-under-Roberto-Martinez, it would be nice to see us bring in some players who can retain the ball for more than 30 seconds, something which has consistently eluded us in our three seasons in League One and is often our downfall in games against better teams, where we spend 90 minutes chasing the ball and get completely knackered.
That said, I think we should temper our expectations that Monk is going to bring Total Football to the Abbey, as it seems that, despite his Swansea upbringing, he is a bit more no-nonsense than the likes of Martinez. This article in The Athletic, written at the time of his appointment at Sheffield Wednesday, is full of interesting details including:
His brand of football has been deemed pragmatic and direct, playing to his teams’ strengths rather than being tactically ambitious.
This also chimes with a tweet I received from a random Swansea fan yesterday:
And listen to what the man himself said in his first interview, when asked what his plans were for the rest of this season:
“The squad is where the squad is. There’s characteristics of that squad that you’re not going to change in this period of time. A lot of my experience has been in these type of situations where, rather than forcing the team to adapt to me, I have to adapt to the team, to play them to their strengths and get the results we need.”
A pragmatic/realistic streak is definitely no bad thing for a Cambridge United manager, but hopefully Monk can marry this up with a way of playing that is slightly more ambitious than we’ve seen from either of the previous two managers.