Diogo Jota was glorious at his athletic peak - his death is a brutal reminder of life's fragility

The 42

FOR MOST OF us, professional sport is a grand choreography of pure vicariousness.

It is through our athletes’ exploits we can experience their range of feelings and express them just as viscerally, and so the emotional chord between supporter and sportsperson is invisible but taut and clean. 

It is this link which makes so shocking the deaths of Diogo Jota and his brother Andre.

Their death is a bracing, brutal reminder of the sheer fragility of life. That footballers can die at their athletic peak reminds us that everything - everything – in our lives can be snatched away at any moment. This is a necessarily confounding thing. 

Jota’s story is truly too heartbreaking to countenance. He is a father of three young children, and married his long-term partner only 10 days ago.

His children will now grow up without their father; his parents will soon bury their only two children. Do not try to make sense of this because there is no making sense of it. Acknowledge instead the importance of celebrating life. 

Jota was a terrific footballer, a penalty-box striker who made almost 50 appearances for Portugal in the era of their greatest penalty-box striker of all time.

He failed to make his first breakthrough at Atletico Madrid but excelled on loan first at Porto and then at Wolverhampton Wanderers, scoring 17 goals in the 44 Championship games to hoist them to the Premier League.

There his performances were such that Jurgen Klopp and Liverpool identified him as the right player to further elevate his recently-crowned champions, whose performances had marked them out as arguably the greatest team in the club’s rich history.

Jota, in Klopp’s own words, proved to be the “perfect signing.”

He shared Roberto Firmino’s intelligence at linking play and creating space for Mohamed Salah and Sadio Mane, and also had the ferocious work-rate needed to lead Klopp’s intense pressing game, melding these qualities with a unerring threat in the penalty area.

Though only 5ft 10in, Jota was superb in the air, and Jamie Carragher has publicly maintained that Jota was the best pure finisher at Liverpool, even moreso than Salah.

He could also be relied upon to carry Liverpool in Salah’s absence, scoring twice against Arsenal in the 2022 League Cup semi-finals while Salah and Mane were at the Africa Cup of Nations.

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Liverpool would go on to win the trophy, the first of Jota’s major medals at Anfield. There followed the FA Cup a few months later, another League Cup medal last year and, of course, his first Premier League medal last season. 

There will forever be a poignancy now to the fact Jota, who wore the number 20 jersey, scored the very first goal of a season that delivered Liverpool’s 20th league title.

His final goal was the winner in an Anfield derby against Everton, and it was a signature Jota goal: taking possession near a crowded penalty area, he bashed and wriggled his way forward -his brain whirring much too quickly for the defenders in front of him – before tucking the ball away. 

His appetite to battle with defenders belied his height, and in truth it contributed to the injury problems which saw him play less for Liverpool than either Klopp or Arne Slot would have liked. 

“Diogo gets in each game knocks like crazy,” said Klopp last year.  “If I go through the list of medical reports I got over the years since Diogo is here, he’s in each and every one of them. Not as injured, just as – ‘has a bruise, has a knock, has that’ – after each game.”

For all his obvious talents, it is this elemental bravery of Jota’s that most endeared him to supporters.

Amid the celebrations at Anfield with the Premier League trophy, Jota told an interviewer his next plan was to win the Nations League with Portugal, a vow on which he duly delivered.

This was a belated moment of joy in the international realm for Jota, who was forced to miss the 2022 World Cup because of injury. Morocco’s defensive stand in their 1-0 quarter-final win over Portugal was made much easier by Jota’s absence. 

He leaves a great absence now.

The vividness and intensity of sporting theatre puts flesh and a bright glare on Shakespeare’s theory of life as a walking shadow, but he was right about the ignorance of the curtain’s fall. 

“It doesn’t make sense,” said Cristiano Ronaldo in reaction today.  Ronaldo is right.

Enjoy life. Treasure life. 

Written by Gavin Cooney and originally published on The 42 whose award-winning team produces original content that you won’t find anywhere else: on GAA, League of Ireland, women’s sport and boxing, as well as our game-changing rugby coverage, all with an Irish eye. Subscribe here.