A smile spreads across Alexis Sánchez’s face at the memory. It is not quite the same grin that has already become so familiar, just five months into his stay in England, the bright white beam that has greeted so many goals in so few games for Arsenal. It is gentler, more reflective than that.

It comes as the Chile forward casts his mind back to his childhood in Tocopilla, the sun-baked town in Chile’s arid north where his mother raised him and his four brothers. He calls it a happy but tough place, a mining town where the earth’s bounty has long since been exhausted, a place “where people fight to have food in their house every day”.

He remembers how, every Christmas, local dignitaries