Jota's death could inspire Liverpool to new heights or make title defence tough

Irish Daily Mirror

5 days ago

For Arne Slot and Liverpool, a pre-season that interrogated their psyche in the most brutal fashion has unfolded as a dignified exercise in love pushing back the forces of darkness.
Diogo Jota's tragic passing on July 3rd seeped into every nook and cranny of the House of Shankly, the pollutants of shock, grief, anger and bewilderment seeming to turn even the ancient Mersey waters the deepest shade of black.
Anguish was plastered like a thousand billboards across a city where football and tragedy have too frequently coalesced, where those uniformed in the club's storied red shirts are often the primary measure of an entire tribe's dreams.
Liverpool handled an impossible situation with enduring class. Slot spoke beautifully, Jota's number 20 jersey was retired, players and supporters came together in a cathartic and tender outpouring.
Now, Diogo's friends have to go back to the day job. They must play competitive football again, deal with the remorseless scheduling, unceasing spotlight and mental and physical stresses of a Premier League season.
For all the professional counselling made available to players, nobody can predict with any certainty how the inhabitants of that super-heated Anfield bubble will react to having passed through such an emotional tempest.
Over the course of a 38-game season that begins with Friday's visit of Bournemouth, might the psychological haymaker of losing a just-married colleague in crushing fashion have a concussive effect on their title defence?
In November 2014, Australian test batsman Phil Hughes — the youngest player to have scored two centuries in a single test match — died aged 25, two days after being struck on the top of the neck by a ball in a domestic match in Sydney.
The impact caused a split in an artery triggering a massive bleed into the brain.
A freakish and catastrophic accident, it convulsed a cricket mad nation. Flags flew at half mast at the Melbourne and Sydney Cricket Grounds. Former Australian captain Michael Slater said his country was weeping. David Warner of Australia touches the tribute to the late Phil Hughes as he walks out at Sydney Cricket Ground (Image: Ryan Pierse - Cricket Australia via Getty Images)
Just ten weeks later, the Aussies played their first game as co-hosts of the 2015 Cricket World Cup.
Seeded fourth, they performed like a team possessed. Player after player talked about finding new energy levels, about being propelled to glory by their fallen team-mate.
They trounced England by 111 runs in their opening game and overwhelmed Pakistan, India and New Zealand in the knockout stages to be crowned world champions.
Team captain Michael Clarke felt the presence of Hughes during those games, providing psychic fuel.
Wearing an armband with his late team-mate's initials, he said: 'It's been a tough time, but we played this World Cup with 12 players on the pitch.'
Of course, there is no universal rule. Because Australia drew a fraternal strength from their desire to respect Hughes's legacy, it does not mean Liverpool will summon new energy from their undoubted affection for Jota.
Elite athletes sit alone in a brilliant rectangle of light seemingly unbound by many of the constraints that restrict the rest of us.
When mortality strikes this escapist playground, it rocks supporters. But it also asks the hardest questions of those who remain in the arena.
On March 2nd, 2004 the then Tyrone football captain Cormac McAnallen passed away in his sleep from an undiagnosed heart condition. He was 24. Cormac McAnallen (Image: ©INPHO/Patrick Bolger)
Eighteen months after his death, Tyrone would win their second All-Ireland and three years later another. Team-mate Sean Cavanagh would subsequently talk of how his friend was at his shoulder in those moments.
'Virtually every game I played, especially the big games, any time I looked for inspiration, I went and said prayers at Cormac's grave.
'This story is a bit weird to be honest, but it's true. The day before the 2008 All-Ireland final, I went to Cormac's grave around 11 o'clock in the morning, and I was just saying a few prayers when this cat appeared from absolutely nowhere.
'It sat at my feet the entire time I was there, and it then genuinely vanished, like someone turned out a light. It just wasn't there anymore, and I'm not into the hocus pocus stuff, I'm the biggest critic of that stuff, but this spooked me out.
'I got into the car, and in 2003 the Tyrone team had made a CD where we all picked a song, and Cormac's song was 'Gold' by Spandau Ballet. I was already spooked by the cat thing, and the radio then plays this song, and I'm like, 'what's going on here?''.
As he told the journalist, Lee Costello: 'I then go and play one of the greatest games I ever played, won the All-Ireland, won man of the match.
'About a month later I got chatting to Cormac's aunty who was telling me Cormac's cat had disappeared. When I described the cat, she said that 'that was it'.'
The Nigerian fighter Young Ali, never regained consciousness after being stopped by Barry McGuigan at London's Grosvenor House Hotel in the summer of 1982. After six months in a coma, the stricken African passed away. Barry McGuigan celebrates after beating Eusebio Pedroza at Loftus Road (Image:)
McGuigan endured an existential crisis: 'I didn't want to box anymore. I'd had enough. I was sick to my stomach of it and to think that could happen.
'As a fighter, you never think of things like that because you can't think of things like that.
'You can't think there's a possibility you could end up seriously injured or dead. But that is the reality.'
McGuigan would return to the ring and three years later would defeat Eusebio Pedroza at Loftus Road to become world champion and an unrivalled merchant of hope for the island of Ireland in troubled political times.
There is a world of difference between McGuigan's story and Liverpool's one for the past five weeks. Most obviously, nobody at Anfield inflicted the blow that ended Jota's life.
Yet there may be one tenuous similarity, the phenomenon known as survivor guilt.
All these years later, it has never quite left McGuigan.
'I found myself asking why it had happened to Ali and not to me. I went to church and prayed a lot.'
Manchester United, like Liverpool, were champions of England, when a plane sped down a German airport runway in a snowstorm on February 6th, 1958.
The Munich Air Disaster claimed the life of eight players and a total of 23 people, as well as inflicting terrible injuries on manager Matt Busby among others.
English football's crown prince Duncan Edwards, club captain Roger Byrne, centre-forward Tommy Taylor and Dubliner Liam Whelan were among those who lost their lives.
Bobby Charlton, then just 20, awoke on the airfield, still strapped to his airline seat, with debris all around him, the plane broken up and the blizzard still swirling. He turned to his side to see a team-mate lying dead. Bobby Charlton in his hospital bed following the Munich air crash (Image: Bela Zola/Daily Mirror/Mirrorpix via Getty Images)
'There was very little wrong with me physically but I could not stop thinking about the accident. I felt drained of all emotion. Why me? Why should I be left?'
The resilience of United's response defied belief.
They played again just 16 days after the tragedy, 66,124 packing into Old Trafford on a night of monumental emotion to see them somehow fashion a draw with Nottingham Forest.
And though, their bid for a hat-trick of league titles would fizzle out (they finished ninth), United would reach the FA Cup final and European Cup semi-final. The following season a not far from scratch team would finish runner-up in the league.
Nobody yet knows how events on Spain's A-52 motorway five weeks ago have rewritten the map of Liverpool hearts or how it will effect performances in the days, weeks and months ahead.
Honouring the memory of their fallen friend may drive the Anfield fellowship, their warm tears may burn cracks in the ice sheet of their composure.
What is certain is that Jota, frozen in time at 28 years of age, will be a beloved and powerful presence each time Kop disciples gather at their house of worship.