Garry Monk hailed Saturday’s victory over Sheffield Wednesday as “another step forward” and believes his side could have ended the 2-0 win with even more goals on the board.

Marcus Antonsson and Chris Wood struck in the second half at Hillsborough to secure United’s first three points of the new season and claim the Yorkshire derby bragging rights.

“It’s important to get the three points, but my focus was to see improvements from the group,” Monk said.

“I think we’ve had improvements in each of the previous games and I wanted to see another step forward today. We’ve been working every day for that improvement.

“It’s been difficult because we’re right at the start of the journey and, at big club like this, you’re expected to win every game – rightly so.

“The key is to not put too much pressure on the players but to see improvements every day and in every game. I thought today was another step forward – it was pleasing to see.

“The players were excellent. We worked to a gameplan and focused on it.

“That was another improvement – we’ve had gameplans for the other games but didn’t follow them up for the full 90 minutes. Today, we had a gameplan that we following all the way through and we got our just rewards for it. It was an excellent team performance.

“This league is very harsh, but as long as we know that the team is consistently performing and getting better – that’s my job, that’s what I’m focused on. We’re still only at the very start of it.

“The goals we scored today were very good – we could have had a few goals. We had some good opportunities and I thought we looked dangerous all game.

“We used our possession well – to be dangerous with it – and that was part of our gameplan. We didn’t want to keep the ball in front of them for too long with the players they had and we didn’t want to keep the ball in the middle with the amount of players they had.

“We attacked down their sides and were very dangerous – that’s what we worked on. I thought we created some real opportunities and, if we were being greedy, we could have scored a few more goals. But I can’t complain, it was a really good attacking performance.”