Garry Monk's start to life at Sheffield Wednesday has been impressive - given time, it could be epic

At 40 years old he has never managed out of the top two tiers of English football and has sat in the dugout of five teams in just over five years of management – an incredible turnover considering the size of those clubs; Swansea, Leeds, Middlesbrough Birmingham and now Wednesday.

His already high stock is going up and up at Sheffield Wednesday, navigating off-field distractions to take the club deep into the promotion conversation at the season’s half-way mark despite being parachuted into a club still reeling from the abrupt departure of Steve Bruce.

Monk’s whistle-stop tour of some of the Championship’s largest clubs means that despite relative success, he has had little time to set roots at a club.

But with several senior players approaching the end of their contracts, he has been given a rare opportunity to build something in his image going forward, regardless of where this season takes them.

Asked of his long-term image for the club, Monk said: “If you ask every single manager in the world, time is what we would love.

“But we also understand that time is not in a sentence we would use very much.

“What you have to do is make yourself competitive.”

That’s something he’s spoken about often since his arrival at S6.

Rafael Benitez once described football management as ‘building an aeroplane while it is already flying’, a quote that captures Monk’s situation at Wednesday.

“The only thing that will ever matter is results, that gets you that longer time,” he said.

“That’s what I’m trying to do here, is to get a good flow of results, to make us consistent, and to build the team as we go through that.

“I came in at a difficult time for the club.

“We were already underway and we’d already played.

“It’s unusual to do that, I’d not done that before but we got to work, the staff and players have been great and we’re trying to build together.”

Time Monk will surely get if the results keep coming.

His image for the future of Sheffield Wednesday remains to be seen.