So the champions let down the good Mr Klopp. How will he respond? How will the mixandpack operation respond to next week’s results for the last year’s efforts? Where are we going?

I have set some targets for the business. They depend on finding new business and on improving the productivity performance across the business, old and new. They are not outstandingly difficult targets: 10% sales and 15% productivity growth, but they are challenging for a business that seems to struggle to learn from its mistakes.

This year I want us to make some significant progress in five areas: the development of our supervisory cadre so that they can help their teams to achieve more, an unrelenting focus on productivity improvement, a modest but real expansion of capacity, a sustained effort to extend and expand our digital marketing and an expanded and reinforced IT system to provide timely and accurate management information to the production staff.

Each of the five areas needs time and resources to progress but possibly the most difficult is the first because it needs the participants to engage wholeheartedly in the process. It is also possibly the most important of the five because it is potentially an amplifier of everyone’s efforts.