Sheffield United believe they have the core to tackle top-flight test after promotion - Alan Biggs

Training. The boardroom.

While there is little clarity regarding the latter, Billy Sharp provides a very telling pointer to the roots of Sheffield United’s return to the Premier League.

It’s unglamorous and basic. They simply raised the intensity of the invisible bit that takes up most of the week.

And it’s also why, given the expectation of scant funding, the manager wants to keep an admittedly ageing band together by securing all his dozen-or-so out-of-contract players.

Once you have good players with good attitudes - and Paul Heckingbottom gave himself no excuses from day one on that front - the rest can be belt and braces.

I heard as much from both manager and captain after the Blades confirmed their promotion back to the top flight.

When I asked whether, amid ownership uncertainty, he had a base to tackle the top flight, Heckingbottom pointed to the dressing room and said: “Yeah - it’s in there!”

A big clue that the core of experienced players who have been up, down and up again will remain at the heart of it.

Otherwise, you risk ripping the heart out of your dressing room, as appeared to happen at the start of this season following a signing frenzy at Nottingham Forest.

And what this group has achieved is, as the Blades boss put it, “vital for the health” of a club that has been stretched beyond its financial limits.

Whatever happens on the ownership, Hecky is putting his trust in a dressing room that has shut its doors to all of that and conducted business as usual.

Which brings us to the all-important day-to-day business and how it’s reverted to the Chris Wilder template since the fleeting tenure of Slavisa Jokanovic in between.

Skipper Sharp told me: “I remember speaking to him (Heckingbottom) when he was working at the academy and we weren’t doing great at the time.

“We (the players) were saying that the standards in training weren’t good enough … and then you can’t do it on a Saturday.

“I’ve always said that when Chris Wilder was here the training every day was so competitive - and we thrived off that for the games.

“We became relentless and that’s what we’ve done this season. We’ve had spells when we haven’t been great but we’ve ground out results.”

In an ideal world, Heckingbottom would be thinning the squad for arrivals, but it’s far from that - with any new club buyers surely very unlikely to be installed within Prince Abdullah’s four-week timescale.

“I’m pretty clear with our financial situation,” Hecky told me. “We’re not in control of loans and they’ll probably go …. so I’d love to keep every one of these players here and then just recruit the best five or six we can with whatever money we’ve got left.

“If you end up losing five or six of this group as well as your loans and you’re then recruiting 10 or 12, that just doesn’t add up to me on the money we’ve probably got available.”

It’s this group’s special spirit, daily grind and sheer hard work that has delivered for a hard-pressed owner who, to his credit, bucked the trend of relegated clubs selling their star players.

The extent of his commitment now, if no takeover emerges, is hard to gauge but we do know exactly the commitment to expect below stairs.