Louis Saha is still getting to grips with English, and you fear the worst when told that the dressing room is the setting for most of his linguistic learning. Yet his thoughts are not expressed in the depressingly familiar cliches of footballers, or come to that, the deputy prime minister, who recently described himself as "most gutted".
Instead, except for an occasional lapse into franglais, Saha speaks with refreshing purity, describing Fulham's visit to Anfield for tonight's Worthington Cup tie as "a pleasure for us because we can learn very quickly for next season.
"You have to have a mark for players and we can find that tonight," he goes on. "It is more a game to show what we can do, more a game for confidence than for us to believe we can win."
The Worthington Cup has become so debased by clubs such as Arsenal and Manchester United refusing to take it seriously that it is now a back-door route to Europe for the rest of the football clubs in the league.
Usually, there would also be little reason to assume that it would end in anything but a comfortable victory for Liverpool, who inflicted a club-record 10-0 defeat on Fulham in this competition in 1986.
This season, though, after the manner in which Fulham, under their manager Jean Tigana, have planted the beautiful game in the previously barren landscape of the First Division, it is an encounter which will intrigue the most jaundiced fan.
Sides leading the First Division at this stage of the season are normally favourites for relegation from the Premiership next term. But this Fulham side have played so many teams off the park that a growing number of them insist they will be a match not only for Liverpool but for Manchester United in next month's FA Cup third-round tie.
Certainly, says Saha, there will be no discernible increase in nerves in the Fulham dressing room at Anfield. "We can relax and play our game," he says. "It's easy for us to play a big match because they have great players and, if we lose, it is normal. Also the manager has given us so much confidence that it is possible to play football without pressure. We think only of the football."
In private, at least, Tigana is teasingly suggesting that he may rest some of his leading players, as he did against Derby in the previous round, which ended in a 3-2 win. But you have to believe that curiosity, not to mention a romantic streak, will get the better of him, aching to know, like everyone else, whether his team are genuine Premiership material or simply flat-track bullies.
Saha would be most gutted not to find his name on the team sheet, though he does not put it in those words, saying: "I would be disappointed and so would any of the other players. We all want to play in this one."
Saha, 22, who played five Premiership games for Newcastle on loan two seasons ago, joined Fulham from Metz in June for £2.1m. He was Tigana's first signing and in a matter of months he has been transformed from a hesitant winger to one of the deadliest strikers in the country, much like the metamorphosis of Thierry Henry at Arsenal.
Saha says: "It is similar to Henry because, like him, I started on the wing. To be changed into a central striker you have to have a good manager to give you confidence and progress you in the position. Mr Tigana said to me that I was a good player but that I did not have the confidence to play well all season and he would progress me mentally.
"When you have a good manager you have to trust him and I want to give him lots of things. I want to say to him by my play, yes, you were right."
The message to his highly regarded manager could not be clearer if he used a loud-hailer. Having set himself a seemingly wildly optimistic goals target of 20 for the season, Saha has already reached it, 15 coming in the league.
However Fulham do tonight, none of their vanquished First Division rivals doubts that their brilliant football will carry them into the top division for the first time in 32 years, completing a journey from the Third that will have taken five seasons and five managers.
Opposing sides' fans regular applaud Tigana's team off, leaving Saha bemused: "It's unbelievable and I think you only see that in England. In France, never."
Even when Fulham enjoyed a 10-year tenure of the old First Division between 1959 and 1968, their longest in the top flight, they were as much fodder for comedians as opposing sides. Now, fascinatingly, the borough of Fulham and Chelsea has two peacock football outfits, who next season will invite the country to compare their plumages.
Not that there will be any comparison between their work patterns. Imagine the reaction of dilettantes such as Chelsea's Frank Leboeuf and Marcel Desailly if asked to report for training at 7am, as Fulham were in pre-season, for what would be the first of three daily sessions.
Saha and co were not overjoyed by it at first. But the early birds have eaten plenty of worms since then, and tonight it is their own reputations which they are anxious should not be swallowed whole.
Source footballunlimited by Roy Collins