Garry Monk believes Saturday’s clash with Huddersfield Town signals the start of an important period of the season – and the United boss has urged his side to remain fully focused amid the Yorkshire derby atmosphere.

United are looking to kick-start their Sky Bet Championship campaign after a mixed opening month, with league leaders Huddersfield arriving at Elland Road having taken 13 points from their first five fixtures.

“It’s an important period for us,” said Monk. “We haven’t had many home games so far – we had a lot of away games last month – but it flips on its head this month.

“Five of our seven games last month were away; this time we’ve got five of our next seven at home.

“We really want to utilise that and get our season started at Elland Road. We know the crowd is going to be really passionate in giving their support for the boys.

“We want to put a display on which gets them going and derbies are always good games.

“I understand all of that but really I’m just focusing on the players and their jobs for Saturday. I’m trying to get three points and we’re focusing on that.

“We want to let all of those other outside influences take care of themselves, but we’ll do that by putting a performance on the pitch and that’s what we’re looking to do.

"From the derby games I've been involved in, both as a player and as a manager, it's generally the team with the most focus that comes out on top."

Reflecting on the recent international break, Monk added: “It’s been good to have a period working with the team, which you don’t often get as the season is going on because of the amount of games.

“There isn’t usually a lot of time between games to really have full preparations in terms of our time on the grass with the players – it’s really about recovery in those periods.

“It was good to have two full weeks of good work, trying to improve the ideas that we have and also putting some good physical work in. The players did very well and took everything on board.

“We feel like we’ve taken another step forward in our improvement and we want to try and show that in the games coming up.

“Some of the players have had more time at the club with myself than others in terms of working on new ideas, so it’s really about getting those other guys up to speed as much as possible.

“Then it’s about going into this next period of games with a really positive attitude and focus on trying to get some good results.

“It’s been good to have a prolonged period working with the players to really drum things into them. Their attitude towards it has been brilliant and we’re looking for a reaction now – a show of our improvement.

“We want to keep doing the things that we’ve been doing well and then look at our mistakes and try to correct and cancel them out of our game.

“Slowly but surely, I think we’re improving. We’ve had setbacks and we’ve had improvements along the way – what we want is to find that consistency.

“We spoke to the group about our consistency levels during the international break. We know what we’re capable of – we just have to make sure we do it on a consistent basis. That’s what our focus is on.”