EXCLUSIVE Dakota Johnson shows off killer bikini body with BFF Kate Hudson on wild girls trip in Ibiza after Chris Martin heartbreak
The Fifty Shades star, 35, flaunted her flawless physique aboard a luxury yacht in the celeb-packed hotspot, just weeks after quietly calling it quits with the Coldplay frontman, 48.
The duo, who first got together in 2017, and got engaged years later, finally pulled the plug in June—but according to an exclusive DailyMail source, a secret A-list insider is already working behind the scenes on a reunion.
Now, fresh off a wild night out in Italy with Ricky Martin, Dakota was ready to let loose again—this time slipping into a skimpy white two-piece while Oscar nominee Kate turned heads in a bright yellow bikini.
Dakota cooled off with a drink as she soaked up the rays and took in the sights—while serving plenty of her own.
Kate couldn't resist showing off her pert derrière as she climbed back onto the boat, flashing a cheeky grin.
The Fifty Shades star, 35, flaunted her flawless physique aboard a luxury yacht in the celeb-packed hotspot, just weeks after quietly calling it quits with the Coldplay frontman, 48
Also on board was Kate's stylist Sophie Lopez, who brought more bikini heat to the scene with her own bombshell look.
The jaw-dropping bikini parade came after Dakota and Kate enjoyed an al fresco dinner at Rome's iconic Pierluigi restaurant—where they got a sweet surprise.
Ricky Martin, 53, happened to be dining nearby and casually walked over to say hello to the Johnson-Hudson crew.
The Livin' La Vida Loca singer pulled up a chair and joined the group, chatting and laughing with Dakota, Kate, and their friends.
The trio shared hugs and animated conversation, soaking up the gorgeous weather and the enchanting Roman atmosphere.
The wild girls' trip comes after Martin sparked speculation with a cryptic shout-out to Dakota at Coldplay's Las Vegas show in June.
'Thank you so much everybody,' the Paradise singer said to the sold-out crowd at Allegiant Stadium, before unexpectedly referencing Johnson's latest film.
'Be kind to yourself, be kind to each other,' he admonished before adding, 'Don't forget to see Materialists! We love you!' in video shared by Deuxmoi.
While the person who shot the video seemed to think the promotion meant 'THEYRE NOT BROKEN UP,' others disagreed.
'I can totally seeing him supporting her even after the break up,' another stated.
'You can breakup with someone and still be supportive. Look at him and GP,' said one fan, referring to the hitmaker's successful relationship with ex-wife Gwyneth Paltrow.
'I mean, didn't he help pioneer conscious uncoupling?' asked a fan, referring to the way Martin and Paltrow formally parted in 2014, although their divorce was not finalized until two years later.
Reps for the pair have not officially confirmed their split.
DailyMail.com's source said the 50 Shades of Grey star 'held a flame for them to be together because she loved him so much and loved his kids so much.'
The insider continued: 'Dakota is devastated that she isn't going to be around his kids as much anymore, but wants them to know that she is always there for them.'
They added that there is a chance the pair may reconcile but 'right now, being separated will do wonders if they were to have any type of future together.'
They added that there is a chance the pair may reconcile but 'right now, being separated will do wonders if they were to have any type of future together.'
DailyMail first reported trouble between the pair in August 2024 but a rep later confirmed they were still together.
The pair had a brief rumored split in 2019 which was alleged to be over Martin pushing for them to have children, but they quickly got back together.
Martin famously split from Paltrow the mother of his two children Apple, 21, and Moses, 19, in March 2014 after ten years of marriage.
The then-Hollywood power couple described their separation at the time as a 'conscious uncoupling' and had their divorce finalized in July 2016.
Martin was reported to be in an on-and-off relationship with actress Annabelle Wallis before they split in August 2017.
He was first seen with Dakota at a sushi restaurant in Los Angeles in October 2017 when they were reported to be 'cozy, laughing and affectionate'.
Dakota, the daughter of Don Johnson, 75, and Melanie Griffith, 68, was spotted a month later at a Coldplay concert in Buenos Aires, Argentina, leading to fans posing social media pictures of her enjoying the show.
The couple were seen out on more dates around Los Angeles in early 2018.
But it was nearly a year later that they made their first openly public appearance together at Stella McCartney's Autumn 2018 Collection show in LA.
Dakota appeared to confirm her relationship with Martin in an interview with Tatler in September 2018 when she said: 'I'm not going to talk about it, but I am very happy.'
The following November, she is said to have met Paltrow, her new husband Brad Falchuk, and Martin's children at a Thanksgiving dinner
The couple were spotted again with Paltrow and Falchuk on the beach in the Hamptons, New York, in August 2019.
Paltrow opened up about her ex-husband's relationship with Dakota in a 2020 interview with Harper's Bazaar, describing how the actress had become part of her family.
She said: 'I love her. I can see how it would seem weird because it's sort of unconventional. But I think, in this case, just having passed through it iteratively, I just adore her.'
Johnson gushed over Martin's children in a 2024 interview, saying: 'I love those kids like my life depends on it. With all my heart.'
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The Sun
33 minutes ago
- The Sun
90s music legend reveals terrifying ordeal as intruder breaks into hotel room and bosses forced to beef up security
Skunk Anansie star Skin has revealed how a man posing as room service tried to mug her in her hotel room. The British singer and musician, whose real name is Deborah Anne Dyer, is currently on tour across Europe. 6 6 6 She revealed details of the incident on Facebook, saying : "Somebody tried to mug me in my room. They woke me up at 6am after an 18 hour tour bus journey. I was tired and they said it was room service. "The Brixton thing in me said 'Ding ding'. "There were no tray and I thought something was wrong. I cussed the guy and he said he would come back. "It was just about 6am. They found the guy from my description. I did a Karen and said 'I want to speak to the manager'. "The hotel said they had to let him go as our stories did not match up. "They said he was looking for his girlfriend but it was dodgy. "In the end the manager tells me there is no case." The star explained that things could have been a lot worse had she not been alert. "You know sometimes in your life when you have steam blowing," Skin said. "I had to take myself away from this man and the situation. We made the hotel look at the cameras to get a picture of this man. "He was leaning up against my door. He could have pushed the door in with a knife or he could have had Chloroform. "Who knows what would have happened. But I am a fighter and that is going to get me in trouble." Following the scary ordeal, the singer said they are now forced to be more vigilant when staying at hotels. The musician continued: "Now I will have to get one of those little lock things to put in the door. If you are in a band you will need to get one. It can happen to you. "Don't wait for something awful to happen. "Put better security and cameras into your hotels and key cards so you can use the lift. "I am still vexed even telling the story. Never open your door at weird times useless you know who is there." Skin claimed the hotel is continuing to "review their security systems" to increase the hotel guests protection. The hitmaker added: "I'm not trying to get anyone fired, my life mantra is that prevention is better than a cure. Hotels can do a lot to make their clients safe. "The reaction should not be to automatically pit my word against someone clearly being dodgy because you didn't catch him camera doing it. But thanks to Pullman Hotels for listening and doing something about it, that is much appreciated." Skin is lead vocalist of Skunk Anansie. In 2015, Skin joined the judging panel of the Italian version of talent competition The X Factor for one season. The band, which was formed back in 1994, released three albums and sold more than five million records worldwide. They are best know for their 1995 hit Weak. They split in 2001, before reforming in 2009. As of 2024 the band have released six studio albums and toured with including music legends David Bowie, U2, and Lenny Kravitz. 6 6 6
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
This month's best paperbacks: Deborah Levy, David Nicholls and more
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Since the Neanderthal extinction, 'the wedge between human beings and nature' has become 'far deeper than the wedge between factory owners and factory workers that created the conditions of twentieth century life'. The left, he believes, needs to properly understand this. Meanwhile, shadowy French authorities have decided that Lacombe and the 'Moulinards' – the post-Debordian eco-commune he mentors by email – need to be steered out of their less than utopian rural domesticity and towards some act of serious terrorism, so they can be dealt with. So they hire Sadie Smith, a freelance American spy-cop, to infiltrate and provoke an outrage. The situation Sadie finds on the ground is confused and intersectional, centred on a real-life green issue: the diversion of local water supplies into vast 'mega-basins' to support corporate agribusiness projects at the expense of the local farmers and the environment. Actors within and without the Moulinard commune, less in bad or good faith than in something shifting constantly between the two, all have their motives for protest or intervention. Sadie is a triumph of character – not quite fully self-deceived, not even entirely corrupted by the barely controlled confusions, emotional complications and near-disasters of the deep-cover agent's life. She's a satire, but she's also being straight with us. She's not quite a sensationist, although the world pours in on her senses, and through hers into ours. How, Rachel Kushner asks in this Booker-shortlisted novel, does the individual's embrace of experience interface with the ideological? In what circumstances can ideology even permit an interface? Sadie Smith is perhaps both question and answer. M John Harrison £8.99 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Psychology The truth about teenagers Coming of Age Lucy Foulkes What does your reminiscence bump look like? If this sounds like a blow to the head with a touch of amnesia, it isn't – but it might be just as painful. No, as Lucy Foulkes explains in her eye-opening guide to the psychology of adolescence, it's the period of life during which people report the greatest number of important autobiographical memories. For most of us it starts around 10 and peaks at 20, taking in a plethora of firsts: first kiss, first love, first time drinking alcohol or taking drugs, first time away from home. Not to mention exams, bullying, breakups and bereavement. Thinking about it, maybe a concussion would be preferable. But then, as this book shows, it's these enduringly vivid years that define the adults we become. Foulkes, a research fellow in psychology at the University of Oxford, conducted 23 in-depth interviews for Coming of Age and they are by turns funny, hair-raising and desperately sad. Occasionally, like Naomi's account of her first love, Peter, they have a sort of novelistic potency. In any case, the majority of readers will find someone they can identify with among her diverse cast of teenagers. Most are now in their 30s or older and are looking back wistfully, with regret, or with something like equanimity. Their accounts allow Foulkes to bring out her central point: that we narrate our lives into being, and that adolescence is so important partly because it is where this narration begins in earnest. The stories we tell ourselves shape who we are, and we can get stuck in these stories, or change them to our advantage. Coming of Age ends movingly. Foulkes showed each of her subjects what she'd written to make sure they were happy with how they'd been portrayed. These were stories of joy, pain and loss that had reverberated through their lives. For many, seeing them presented as part of the broader story of adolescence prompted a re-evaluation. 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Nicholls's novels often confound narrative expectations – most notably with the shock ending of One Day – but there are few surprises here. Short, pacy chapters are energised by a trail mix of jolly headings: in one section, playlist songs that Marnie and Michael share – 'Don't Speak by No Doubt (1996)', 'No Limit by 2 Unlimited (1992)'. Droll signposting aside, we are following the Jane Austen map of romantic plotting: two wounded but complementary souls, initial indifference, misdirected affections, growing attraction, misunderstandings, obstacles, hope and resolution. There is satisfaction to be taken from this midlife redemption tale, not least because it fills a gap: Nicholls's novels now cover love and marriage across every age bracket from teens to mid-50s. It may not be challenging – unlike Austen's Persuasion, quoted in the epigraph, it offers neither visceral desperation nor pent-up agonies – but for many it will be a comforting antidote to the grimness of our grim world, a crowd-pleaser and, surely, a TV hit-to-be. Lucy Atkins £8.99 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Letters Let me be your fantasy Want Gillian Anderson Part of the pleasure of reading Want – a collection of 174 anonymous sexual fantasies submitted by women from around the world – is that the scenarios are often strikingly odd. One contributor dreams of being fed chocolate by the Hogwarts potion master. Another longs to have sex with her office door knob. Women are still seen as less sexual than men, but this book attests to a vivid imaginative hinterland, where the desires are far more inventive than the 'Milf' and 'cheerleader' tropes that dominate man-made porn. In one particularly detailed submission, a woman daydreams about breastfeeding an attractive cashier at the supermarket. The fantasies in this book are sometimes shocking, but hard limits were imposed during the selection process to remove anything that, if acted out in real life, would be illegal. Want is edited by Gillian Anderson, who has restyled herself as a sort of sexual agony aunt after playing a charismatic therapist in Netflix's Sex Education. In her introduction, Anderson explains how she struggled with the less straightforwardly empowering submissions. Some did make the final cut, but they are punctuated by anxious self-justification. One woman interrupts her fantasy about being held captive by a group of robbers to insist that she is 'a feminist', and that the imaginary robbers have her 'consent'. Some of the stories in this book feel too self-censored to be truly erotic. Even so, Want makes for addictive reading. More compelling than the fantasies themselves are the frequent glimpses into the women's real worlds. One contributor confesses that she fantasises about her partner's death – she longs to be free, because she has never explored her true feelings for women. Another writes that she brings herself to orgasm by thinking about her husband cheating on her. He has been unfaithful in reality, so every time she does this, she cries. The real-life loneliness conveyed here is much rawer than the wish-fulfilment. At its best, Want gives you privileged access into the most painful, truthful corners of these women's lives. Kitty Drake £9.89 (RRP £10.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Fiction A transcendent late gift Rosarita Anita Desai Anita Desai's riddling and haunted new novel is set in motion when Bonita, a young Indian woman, meets a tricksy figure in a park in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. A student of Spanish, Bonita is leafing through local newspapers when she is approached. 'The Stranger' – elderly, overfriendly and peculiarly dressed 'in the flamboyant Mexican style that few Mexican women assume at any other than festive occasions' – claims to know Bonita's dead mother, whom she calls 'Rosarita'. She says they met and became friends when the latter came to pursue art under the tutelage of Mexican maestros. Bonita has no recollections of her mother painting or travelling to Mexico. She remembers, however, 'a sketch in wishy-washy pale pastels that had hung on the wall above your bed at home, of a woman seated on a park bench – and yes, it could have been one here in San Miguel – with a child playing in the sand at her feet'. The woman 'is not looking at the child and the child is not looking at her, as if they had no relation to each other, each absorbed in a separate world, and silent'. 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Yagnishsing Dawoor £8.99 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop History An insider's take An African History of Africa Zeinab Badawi There is no shortage of big tomes about Africa written by old Africa hands – those white journalists, memoirists, travel writers or novelists who know Africa better than Africans. This genre, lampooned by Binyavanga Wainaina's satirical essay How to Write About Africa, weaves together stories that exalt the continent's landscape but decry its politics, that revere its wildlife but patronise its people, that use words such as 'timeless', 'primordial' and 'tribal' when explaining Africa's historical trajectories. Zeinab Badawi's An African History of Africa is a corrective to these narratives. Ambitious in scope and refreshing in perspective, the book stretches from the origins of Homo sapiens in east Africa through to the end of apartheid in South Africa. It is informed by interviews Badawi conducted with African scholars and cultural custodians, whose expertise, observations and wisdom are threaded through the book. The very act of telling African history from an African perspective and making this history accessible to a wide audience is an assertion of dignity and an invitation to learn more. As Badawi puts it: 'I hope I have demonstrated that Africa has a history, that it is a fundamental part of our global story, and one that is worthy of greater attention and respect than it has so far received.' She most certainly has. Simukai Chigudu £9.89 (RRP £10.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Biography Friendship and rivalry in LA Didion & Babitz Lili Anolik Journalist Lili Anolik's latest book is a 'provocation', a dual biography of the two friends who carved their initials on to the counterculture of 1960s and 1970s California. Joan Didion used her reporting skills to fashion herself into a serious-minded literary titan, while Eve Babitz's novels and essay collections, compiled from the same social scenes but shaped more loosely and with greater spirit, fell into relative obscurity. That is, until Anolik tracked Babitz down in 2012, by then seriously ill and living in squalor. Anolik became obsessed, helping to restore Babitz's reputation as a writer and chronicler of Los Angeles life, eventually writing the 2019 biography Hollywood's Eve. 'My preoccupation was unbalanced, fetishistic,' she admits here. This time, Anolik uses Didion as the headliner, though seemingly through gritted teeth. When Babitz died, aged 78, in 2021 – just days before Didion, who was 87 – her sister Mirandi discovered boxes of papers in the back of a wardrobe. Anolik was reeled in by an excoriating but unsent letter from Babitz to Didion, which she chooses to interpret as a platonic 'lovers' quarrel'. Babitz assails her friend and occasional collaborator (Didion briefly edited Babitz's first collection, before Babitz 'fired' her) for what she perceives as Didion's dislike of women, her contempt for art, and her deference to her husband. Anolik takes this wounded screed and runs with it, replaying Babitz's story through its entanglements with Didion's. This is vivid, entertaining stuff and often gallops along as if it's been up all night at one of Didion and Dunne's notorious Franklin Avenue gatherings, but it is, perhaps, more provocative than entirely convincing. Rebecca Nicholson £9.89 (RRP £10.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Essays Portrait of the artists The Position of Spoons Deborah Levy "It is a writing adventure to go in deep, then deeper, and then to play with surface so that we become experts at surface and depth,' writes Deborah Levy, and it's as good a statement of intent as any in this collection, which delves into topics both trivial and profound: brothel creepers, car crashes, lemon curd, trauma. The theme, insofar as there is one, is the artists who have inspired her. Many of these are women, and Levy writes skilfully on the complex interplay of self-presentation and effacement that's often demanded of female creativity. Lee Miller 'both hides from and gives herself to the camera'; Francesca Woodman makes 'herself present by making herself absent'. Artists and writers invent things, but they invent themselves too. Levy is good on the prices we find ourselves paying: for art, for love, for fitting in. Of Ann Quin, the avant garde, working-class writer who drowned herself in the sea off Brighton, she says: 'I want to know more about what it took to want to swim home and I know Quin could have told me.' In another short piece called Values and Standards, she writes about an acquaintance she sometimes meets at the school gates. This woman's husband takes pleasure in humiliating her; to survive, 'she had removed her own eyes and saw the world and herself through his eyes'. Levy wonders if she ever 'puts her own eyes back in', and considers her own narrowing of vision at times when 'other things had become bigger. Perhaps overwhelming.' Here is Levy on the French writer and film-maker Marguerite Duras: 'She thinks as deeply as it is possible to think without dying of pain … She puts everything in to language. The more she puts in, the fewer words she uses.' At her best, Levy pulls off a similar feat, plunging into the depths, taking us with her. Freya Berry £9.89 (RRP £10.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Poetry A dazzling voice Bad Diaspora Poems Momtaza Mehri The long-awaited debut collection from the former Young People's Poet Laureate for London invites readers to consider the concept of diaspora. Mehri brings unflinching discursive skills to verse that melds criticism, autobiography and essay while still achieving a crisp sonic momentum characteristic of lyric poetry. The meanings of diaspora in this collection are as varied as the forms Mehri deploys: prose poems, found poems, poems using emojis and erasures. 'Diaspora is witnessing a murder without getting blood on your shirt.' 'I don't want to guard something I don't own.' Mehri finds a new tone somewhere between Gwendolyn Brooks's effortless musicality and Carolyn Forché's noun-laced haunting intensity. Hers is a dazzling voice that refuses to speak from a podium, preferring to examine guilt, culture and personhood from within the 'nightly decision' of community. Oluwaseun Olayiwola £9.89 (RRP £10.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Fiction Life after the apocalypse Juice Tim Winton Tim Winton and speculative fiction may seem an odd combination. His novels excel at the here and now, depicting lives at the margins, young love and young parenthood, violence at the hands of fathers. But the harsh beauty of the western Australian landscape has long been a presence in his work, and Winton has also long highlighted his country's fragility in the face of climate chaos, and been fiercely critical of the exploitation of Australia's mineral wealth. So the cli-fi premise of Juice, his latest novel, could be a perfect Winton fit. Set in an unspecified future, some centuries from now, the book opens on a man and a girl driving across a landscape blackened by ashes. The hellscape is worthy of the Mad Max franchise, with slave colonies springing up from the parched earth like termite mounds. There are echoes of Cormac McCarthy's The Road here, too, in the black dust thrown up by the vehicle's tyres, and in the child passenger, observing everything with a mute wariness. And Winton's ending is a masterstroke, the heart-in-your-mouth final chapter one of the best things I've read in a long time. Rachel Seiffert £8.99 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop Fiction A historic hero Yorùbá Boy Running Biyi Bándélé Like the protagonist of Yorùbá Boy Running, Biyi Bándélé had been running from a young age. At 14, he won a writing competition at school; another award in his 20s, for his radio play script Rain, took him to London in 1990. He hit the ground running there, publishing his first novel, The Man Who Came in from the Back of Beyond, in 1991. This was the beginning of a prolific and multifaceted career that, sadly, came to an end when Bándélé died suddenly in 2022 at the age of 54. At the time he was putting the finishing touches to his film adaptation of Wole Soyinka's play Death and the King's Horseman – a play very much centred on death and redemption and now available on Netflix as Elesin Oba: The King's Horseman. He was also working on this posthumous novel, Yorùbá Boy Running, partly inspired by the history of Bándélé's great-grandfather, who, like his protagonist, Samuel Ajayi Crowther, was formerly enslaved. One doesn't come to a posthumous novel for its perfect finish; not all the sections of the book are as polished or as inventive as the opening part. The editors have done a great job of ordering and signposting the different sections with dates and thematic headings, making it easier to follow the sometimes intricate chronology of the narrative. We are lucky and grateful that the author was able to leave us with this bookend to his glorious if truncated career that began long ago in Kafanchan, Nigeria, when he started running towards a distinguished future in faraway London. Helon Habila £8.99 (RRP £9.99) - Purchase at the Guardian bookshop
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Senseless death of Diogo Jota will not stop us celebrating what he brought life
Bad moon, bad times and a river that will be overflowing for some time yet. It is impossible not to feel a deep sense of pain, sadness and shared heartbreak at news of the sudden death of Diogo Jota and his brother André Silva in a car crash in Spain. Jota was 28, father to three young children and a husband to his long-term partner, whom he married 11 days before his death. Things that happen in sport are often described, with due dramatic licence, as tragedies. This is not a sports story. But it is the most terrible human tragedy. Those who have suffered similarly can empathise. But it is above all a private horror, an event that will alter the lives of family and friends for ever. And yet it is of course a sport story too, and for good, warm, vital reasons, because Jota was blessed with the talent, heart and will that qualified him to live the extraordinary public life of a modern-day elite footballer. Within that nexus he was able to do so with the grace, humour and commitment that made him a beloved teammate and fan favourite, and also a fine public sporting figure, an athlete who poured energy, life and love into providing moments of uplift and connection in the shirts of Liverpool, Wolves, Porto, Portugal and his first club, Paços de Ferreira. There is no sensible response when someone dies so young, with an entire second human life as father and husband still to be lived. But at a time when footballers are present constantly in our lives, when to exist in that form is to carry a distinct kind of responsibility – one players such as Jota gladly assume – his death will be a source of much public grief too. Everybody liked Diogo Jota. Those who saw him progress from his Porto neighbourhood of Gondomar felt a huge sense of pride. Liverpool supporters cherished his presence, his intelligence and his hunger for the team. Three years ago he got the song his contributions deserved: He's a lad from Portugal / Better than Figo don't you know, to the tune of Argentina's 2014 World Cup final hymn, which is in turn derived and football-ised from Creedence Clearwater Revival's Bad Moon Rising. And even in the immediate shock there is a huge amount to remember and be glad of in the life of Diogo José Teixeira da Silva, the Portuguese word for the letter J added early on as a footballing nickname. He came through at Paços de Ferreira to the north-east of his home city. Atlético Madrid signed him and loaned him to Porto and then Wolves, which became permanent in 2018. He settled instantly in Wolverhampton, hanging out at the Aromas de Portugal cafe in the city centre, welcoming his first child, playing a bit of training-ground cricket, always ready to meet local people, and even revealing at one point that he'd grown up with a soft spot for Everton in the David Moyes years, because they were 'relentless'. Nobody was ever going to hold that against Jota at Anfield. Have you met this guy? Too nice, too smart, too much of an all-round mensch. He signed in September 2020 and set off like a train, scoring seven goals in his first 10 games and adding speed, drive and expert finishing to that mid-Klopp team. Overall, and we must now say finally, Jota played 182 matches for Liverpool in a revolving folk‑hero frontline that also featured Mohamed Salah, Sadio Mané, Roberto Firmino, Divock Origi, Luis Díaz, Cody Gakpo and Darwin Núñez. Even within that extended cast he was distinct, notable for his intelligence, movement and commitment to the team cause. He made 49 appearances for Portugal and played the last 15 minutes of the Nations League final victory four weeks ago, which would turn out to be his last game of football. And now we have this, a full stop. Why does it seem quite so shocking, even from a distance, even beyond the fans who watched him in the flesh or on some fast-cut remote stream? Perhaps because Jota had that lightness about him, the kind of footballer who barely seems to leave a dent in the grass, who, for all the tactical match-smarts seems still to be playing the same endless teenage game, just in the way he moved and twirled into space. Perhaps because he was a notably intelligent forward, one of those players where you feel you know them just by watching them, every run and pass part of some high-speed internal monologue. Probably it has something to do with the way we observe sports people now generally, something to do with the way the game has become more remote, the connection coming in other ways, through the figures on the screen, the way they move and react, a strange kind of public-private intimacy. Plus, of course, this is just such a violent interruption. It makes no sense. Youth is a finite quality. But young, smart, beautiful, nice people are supposed to live for ever. Whereas in reality it is perhaps a blessing this doesn't happen more often. Professional athletes live hugely intense, fast‑paced lives of constant travel and change. Rishabh Pant, who batted on Wednesday for India at Edgbaston, was lucky to escape with his life after a horrific car crash in Uttarakhand in December 2022, and is additionally cherished for every day he gets to keep on doing this. Jota will now be cherished instead as a vivid and indelible memory. He always spoke really well, which was part of that feeling of intimacy. After scoring a late winner against Tottenham two years ago there was a notably lucid TV interview in which he gave an insight into his own connection to the moment after Liverpool had been pegged back late on. 'I remember Robbo [Andy Robertson] telling me to go on because we normally play that long ball – to go on and believe, and you could feel that was already a good sign. We did that, we won the second ball, we played back, we played again in behind and I could intercept a pass and score the winner. It was amazing. 'It doesn't require too much thinking. I think the moment there that I believed I could intercept was key because I started running in behind and I saw their full-back could pass the ball back. That was the key moment for me and then it was just: 'Make sure you control it right and you hit the target,' and hopefully it's in – and it was!' Jota also mentioned his song that day, which was sung relentlessly around Anfield at full-time, a coronational moment in a career that had begun in the hush of Covid. 'In my first season I scored a few winners as well, late, but there was no crowd and everybody was telling me: 'You should see it if this was full,' the feeling, and I could feel that tonight. It was something special that I will remember for ever.' The reverse is of course now true. Anfield will remember Diogo Jota for ever. Nothing will ease the private grief. There is no script for moments like these. But for what it's worth that song and the feeling behind it will provide its own fond, rolling Viking funeral in the years to come.
