An attentive Ibrahima Konate is in full flow at Liverpool's AXA Centre, revealing all about his career so far, when something catches his eye.
The Reds centre-back is chatting to a handful of publications that includes the ECHO at the club's Kirkby training base when one particular image on the wall of the meeting room grabs his gaze.
The picture in question is of Jurgen Klopp, one that was taken nearly three years ago in Madrid. But it's not the Liverpool manager that is attracting the stare of Konate.
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What has really made the £36m defender's eyes dart is the Champions League trophy Klopp is triumphantly holding aloft on the large greyscale canvas print. It's the same piece of silver that Konate could be clasping himself on Saturday evening.
"I can't stop looking at the trophy!" he admits, before revealing how the clash with Real Madrid in the European Cup final - in his hometown of Paris, no less - is "definitely going to be the best moment of my life".
Konate says: "I don’t have any children yet so I can’t be sure, but I think it will be the greatest moment. The Champions League final. In Paris. My home. If I tried I couldn’t have dreamt of anything better.”
In many ways, the 11-mile trip from where Konate grew up in Paris to the Stade de France, just north of the city in Stade Denis, has been quite the journey. It's one that started when he moved 300 miles south of the capital, to Sochaux in 2014, to pursue his dream; one he now flatly admits is to be eventually viewed as "the best central defender in the world".
His number one target back then, though - at the age of just 14 - was simply to make a living from football.
“My dream at that time was simply to be a professional football player," Konate says with the aid of a translator. "Just to become a pro football player. Of course, When I was 14 I didn’t have in my head the idea of being in a top club – if someone had asked me then at what age will you be when you could maybe be playing for Liverpool I’d have said 28 or 29. At that time, the dream was to be playing pro. I couldn’t think beyond that.
"It's been a long, long journey! I remember years ago when I had just joined Sochaux, there was this final. We made the journey to go to Stade de France to see the under 19s in the final. It’s incredible to think that I was watching a match at that level from the stands just a few years ago, my first time there, and now I’ll be on the grass playing in a Champions League final there. It really is some journey, yes!”
If Konate's plan for his career path was to reach this point by 28, he finds himself five years ahead of his own schedule having turned 23 on Wednesday. As is now customary, the defender was treated to various renditions of 'Happy Birthday' in the different languages spoken within the Liverpool squad just before preparations for the third European Cup final of the Klopp era got underway this week.
He's come a long way from playing in the street with his brothers when money was tight and they would create their own makeshift footballs from paper and sticky tape. But it was this early grounding that has helped propel him to the grandest of stages this weekend.
“I used to play in the cages," he says of his formative years. "I think that like most young Parisians we couldn’t get to see football in proper stadiums, we didn’t have the money. And we didn’t play on [proper] pitches, because we didn’t have those opportunities.
“But we found ways to play football whenever and wherever we could – even with paper! I remember at school, we used Sellotape and paper to make footballs to play with, and of course, we really didn’t need much to be happy, we were happy playing in the streets.
“If it was a ball made out of foam or leather or plastic – it would keep us busy all day. We’d play in the street, those cages, me and my brothers, and that’s why, I think, we have these qualities.
“Everyone knows that Paris is a hot bed with a lot of talent. Today, I’ve been lucky enough to reach this level but it’s not the end in itself – I’ve still got a lot of aims and goals behind all that to reach."
It's been an excellent maiden campaign at Anfield for Konate, whose £36m move from RB Leipzig was confirmed 12 months ago before he officially joined in July. The newly-turned 23-year-old has made 28 appearances so far, including the successful FA Cup final against Chelsea earlier this month.
Having wrapped up a domestic double in the cups before being pipped to the Premier League title by a single point last week, it's been a long season for the Reds. The most sizable of all their 63 games this term is yet to come, however, as Klopp's men meet the 13-time champions of Europe in the biggest club fixture in football on Saturday evening.
For Konate, it will be an extra special night as he aims to finish the season with a flourish, and clearly, he wants to recreate the images that have fixed his attention so much throughout this conversation.
“We have had so many big games before we start thinking about it properly," Konate says. "But it’s going to come round really, really fast now and we need to get ready for it. I hope that we’ll come home with the title. What a story - going to Paris, my hometown and coming back to Liverpool with that trophy for an incredible celebration.”
“I think that for this Champions League trophy, we’re talking about games I watched on TV as a kid and grew up watching. Even the final against Madrid when they lost (in 2018), I watched on the television. So it’s something that is already part of my history because I’ve seen it with my own eyes – it’s indescribable what it means – I’ve not got the words to explain what winning huge trophies like this one would mean.
"The club wants to show that they’re already part of football history, and they want to go on demonstrating that year after year. So when I think about the motto of being together You’ll Never Walk Alone, and having this history together, it is beyond words, beyond dreams."
