As befits anyone from the Ridings, Karl Goose is nothing but straightforward. “My expertise is more heavy civils,” he admits. “The building side is something I’m learning. New clients, meeting new people.”

Now living in the Cotswolds – “not the posh bit” – Goose, who took up the post of Keltbray chief executive at the beginning of December, hails from a village just outside Wakefield in West Yorkshire and growing up his games were cricket and rugby league.

At 54, his rugby playing days are over but he helps out with coaching in union, the latest example of a cross-code convert along the lines of Ireland coach Andy Farrell and France’s defence coach Shaun Edwards, both former teammates at Wigan. “Union has learnt a lot from league,” he says.

His grandfather was a miner – the area where Goose hails from was at one time peppered with pits – but the thought of a life down the pit, even before the closures of the 1980s and 1990s, was not for him and so he went to Nottingham Polytechnic to study quantity surveying.