Poignant scenes at Diogo Jota's funeral cut through traditional football tribalism

Telegraph

2 days ago

Sunglasses concealing his tears, Virgil van Dijk carried a wreath of flowers artfully sculpted into a replica of Diogo Jota's Liverpool '20' shirt, a jersey so freighted with pain that it would never be worn again.
Beside him Andy Robertson offered an identical tribute marked '30', the squad number that Jota's brother, Andre Silva, made his own at Portugal's FC Penafiel. The juxtaposition, reflecting the close fraternal bond that endured until the night they died together on a remote Spanish highway, felt almost unbearably poignant. 'Força!' cried one woman outside the little Baroque church in Gondomar, seeking to give the players strength on a day when they looked ready to dissolve.
The desolation that assailed Van Dijk was acute. Captaincy of Liverpool confers many heavy responsibilities, but none so sorrowful as attending the funeral of a team-mate five years your junior. Twenty-eight years old: it is no time to die. Silva, who like Jota began playing at their hometown club within walking distance of the church, was just 25. The magnitude of the tragedy was such that even Manuel Linda, the bishop of Porto, acknowledged as he addressed the brothers' mother, Isabel, that no words of consolation were adequate. Faith is supposed to offer a blessed sanctuary at times like these. But Jurgen Klopp, a devout Christian and the man who brought Jota to Anfield, has expressed the prevailing sense of numbness, reflecting: 'There must be a higher purpose – but I can't see it.'
These agonies were expressed most starkly by the sight of those left behind. Just two weeks earlier, Rute Cardoso had been at church in Porto to marry Jota, her childhood sweetheart, in a ceremony watched by the couple's three children, all under the age of five. On Saturday she was his widow, trailing behind his coffin, rosary beads hanging from her wrist and a photograph of the man she had lost clutched tightly in her hand.
'My dream came true,' she had written, excitedly posting a few pictures of her wedding dress. Just two days later, that dream would be destroyed in the most violent fashion on a dark road in remote northwestern Spain, where the car containing Jota and Silva veered out of control from a tyre blow-out before exploding in flames. It was the cruellest reminder of the ephemeral nature of hope, of the arbitrariness with which an entire family could be shattered.
Visibly traumatised, Jota's peers travelled across the oceans to converge in solidarity. Ruben Neves, his closest friend in football, had been playing for Al-Hilal in a Club World Cup quarter-final in Orlando 13 hours earlier. But no sooner were his team eliminated by Fluminese than he and Joao Cancelo scrambled 4,000 miles east as Neves assumed his duties as pallbearer, the only non-family member to be given such a role.
Bruno Fernandes, the Manchester United captain, was also present, alongside Manchester City's Bernardo Silva and Ruben Dias, exemplifying the connections they had built across club lines with the Portuguese national team.
The shattering impact of Jota and Silva's deaths so young has cut through the typical parameters of football tribalism. Even Oasis, a band so synonymous with City that they performed the opening concert of their reunion tour in Cardiff with a cardboard cut-out of Pep Guardiola on stage, felt compelled to honour Jota, beaming an image of his Liverpool strip on the giant screens over the closing strains of Live Forever. The tribute was wordless, but still genuinely affecting.
For at a moment of shock so inexplicable, the best response is not rationalisation but simple respect. As Jose Mourinho put it: 'Three kids without a dad, a young woman without her husband, parents losing both sons? It's difficult to understand. Maybe one day we will, but not now.'
A plangent Ave Maria, often chosen for Catholic funeral masses, hung in the air as the guests filed out of church into the mid-morning sunshine. It would be sure, in any circumstances, to make even the most stoic observers cry. But this time the significance of the musical choice was almost too much to absorb: it had, after all, been performed for Jota and his wife at their wedding a fortnight before.
This time the same ensemble, from the Our Lady of the Lapa church, were back to recite it as he lay in a wooden casket. It was little wonder the Liverpool players in the congregation looked so bereft. One moment, they had been waiting to welcome him back for pre-season training. The next, they were assembling for his last goodbye.