Manuel Pellegrini backs Garry Monk after Swansea City sack

Swansea caretaker boss Alan Curtis paid tribute to former manager Garry Monk after his side had a point snatched away from them at Manchester City.

Assistant manager Pep Clotet and coaches James Beattie and Kristian O’Leary have left Swansea City in the wake of manager Garry Monk’s departure.

“But if you ask people where you would expect Swansea to finish – I know they were exceptional, in the last few years they’ve done a great job – most would say if they could even get close to the top half they’d be doing well”. But the last time they really impressed was when they beat the Citizens’ neighbours Manchester United 2-1 way back in August.

Martinez said: “Phil had very good news from the specialist yesterday and we are well on track – probably ahead of what we expected”.

Curtis, who played over 350 games in three different spells at Swansea and has held various coaching positions there during the last two decades, will be assisted in the dug-out by goalkeeping coach Tony Roberts and performance psychologist Ian Mitchell.

Jenkins is understood to have a preferred target in mind, who could be another manager to be recruited from overseas and Ghana’s coach is understood to be the right man for the club. We have always brought in a manager to suit our style rather than changing everything and that is what we will be looking to do again.

“We all feel – staff and players – that we have let Garry down and we want to go a small way to rectifying that on Saturday”.

“We just have to keep a cool head and get on with it and make sure that we do our best”, said midfielder Sigurdsson. We’ve got a period of a lot of games in a short amount of days and every single player will have a very important role in those weeks.

“The whole squad is together and they want our fans to see them fighting and scrapping for everything”.

Fulham are 16th in the Championship table, seven points off the play-off places and Monk would face a tough job to try to take the club up to the Premier League at the first attempt.

Swansea chairman Huw Jenkins said in a statement on Wednesday that the club hoped to appoint a replacement for Monk as soon as possible following the end of his 22-month reign.