Monk casually deflected the questions each time but then, later, explained that his deepest moment of satisfaction from those games came early during the home match against Manchester United. During the week leading to that game, Monk had made an unusual tactical change, switching from the team’s standard formation to a diamond-shaped setup in midfield. Despite having just a few days to practice it, the Swansea players did exactly what they were supposed to do.

“It was like, ‘Yes, yes! That’s how we saw it happening,’ ” Monk recalled. “That’s it for a manager, isn’t it? If it hadn’t worked, it would have been, ‘He’s young, he’s naïve, he doesn’t know.’ But I felt it was the right decision for that game, and so I made it.”

That decisiveness — and the fact that many of his decisions have turned out well — quickly catapulted Monk into the upper tier of managers. As a player for Swansea from 2004 to 2014, Monk helped the club rise from the dregs of the fourth tier to — in 2011 — the glamour of the Premier League. As manager, he has continued the climb. Last season, Swansea finished eighth in the league, the second-highest top-division finish in the club’s 103-year history.

Monk quickly points out that Swansea is still an underdog against teams like Manchester United or Chelsea, if only because those clubs have large payrolls. But smart, measured spending has become part of Swansea’s savvy image, too. Monk’s moves in the transfer market (including this summer’s targeting of the dynamic scorer André Ayew from Marseille) have been almost universally shrewd.

“I always thought that I’d be doing this someday,” he said. “I had a bad knee injury when I was 26, and from then on I started paying attention to training sessions, to how a manager talked to a player, to how he ran the team. I was lucky to have managers like Brendan Rodgers. I even took notes about what I saw. So I always imagined doing this. I just didn’t think it would be this soon.”

Alan Curtis, a longtime fixture in Swansea as a player and a coach, chuckled when he recalled Monk’s first few days as interim manager after Michael Laudrup’s firing in February 2014. Leery of coming off suddenly inflated to his players (who had been, until a few days earlier, his teammates), Monk did not wear a suit on the sideline while coaching and still encouraged the players to call him “Monks” or “Garrs,” just as they had done before.