It’s a serious business you know – restoring position and pride back to Coventry rugby club – and that means text messages containing frivolous phrases such as ‘Operation Phoenix’ do not pass without comment.

“We don’t do phoenixes here any more,” chairman Peter Rossborough tells me in response my request for an update on the state of the Blue and White union.

“A phoenix is a mythical creature and we are fed up with myths. We are based in reality here and that means good players, earning sustainable money and playing for the shirt.”

The reality of paying players, good or otherwise, hasn’t been great for Coventry and while the Cov dollar has brought legends like Zinzan Brooke to the club, the vast majority of players who have worn the famous old shirt since the advent of professionalism have been legends in their own minds only.

But that’s all in the past and the exhumation of old skeletons is not what Rossborough and new Coventry are about, and the other soundbite that stands out from our interview confirms as much.

“Our mission is to make the city as proud of the rugby club’s present and future as its past,” he says.

And to be fair the current custodians of the institution are doing a pretty good job. Indeed on Saturday victory over Macclesfield could lift them from fifth to second in the third tier of English rugby.

Not as high as they have ever been, but as high as they have been for some time and certainly confirmation that their fortunes have bottomed out.

Seeing it in print might make their officials wince but the signs are Coventry are on their way back and the emphasis has changed from ‘if we get back to level two’.

“We are anxious to make sure that when we return to the Championship the finances are in a healthy state and we know we can sustain it,” Rossborough says. “I don’t want us to go up and come straight back down again.

Even with the central funding we would get we are probably not there yet but I hope that will change in the next couple of years.

“The word seems to be spreading around the city that we are a reliable, trustworthy and honest group of people because we are getting a lot of feedback from local businesses.”

The twin pillars of Coventry’s rebirth have been sponsorship deals with Jaguar Land Rover and Unipart Logistics, whose contribution includes the inestimably important role of handling talismanic centre Luke Myring’s transition from full time rugby into the workforce.