Robin van Persie is twisting his hand beside his ear. His mind is turning, too, as he tries to find the words to describe what has gone wrong for Alexis Sanchez at Manchester United.
‘He doesn’t look very happy to me,’ Van Persie says. ‘He looked happy at Arsenal. He doesn’t look happy now. What I’ve seen and felt over the years is that how you feel mentally, how your life is, has a big influence.’
He adds: ‘If you’re happy, you’re 50 per cent fitter, you create more and you enjoy yourself.... so he should find a way mentally to change that.’
Van Persie can sympathise with Sanchez. He, too, swapped Arsenal for United. He, too, knows the baggage that comes with life at Old Trafford.
But the Dutchman finds it harder to empathise. Between 2012 and 2015 he scored 58 goals in 105 appearances for United, and led them to their last Premier League title in 2013.
Sanchez, by contrast, has seen his career nosedive since arriving last January. And with five goals in 45 appearances, he has come to symbolise a club treading water under Ole Gunnar Solskjaer.
‘What is pressure? Over the years I’ve thought about that a lot and pressure is air, you can’t touch pressure. It’s what you put on yourself,’ Van Persie says.
‘It’s important to put pressure in a box and deal with it. Of course, pressure is there because you are playing for a big club and everyone has opinions about you. But you have to manage that.’
Sanchez has not been afforded such luxuries
‘It’s a different time. Over the past couple of years a lot has changed,' Van Persie adds. 'He (joined) a team that was not really playing attacking football because Mourinho was there.'
The Dutchman insists Sanchez's problems are mental. But United can be an unforgiving 'beast'.
'Everyone is demanding not only a win, but (also) attacking football. 77,000 people want to be enjoying it and they are right. We are talking about top-level players,' he says.
Amid Sanchez’s struggles, other forwards have had to shoulder the burden.
Romelu Lukaku has led the line for much of his spell but he could soon be off to Italy.
Van Persie is excited by 17-year-old Mason Greenwood and the Dutchman is a ‘big fan’ of Marcus Rashford, too.
‘(Rashford) has it all,’ he says. ‘But at Manchester the bar is so high. You have to do everything and that is fair – you’re playing at one of the biggest clubs in the world so people can ask that. People want consistency, although he’s young.'
Van Persie adds: ‘You always have people asking for more and they’re right, that’s why you’re there.’
Rashford need only look across the dressing room to see what a failure to meet those expectations can do to a forward.