Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp on Luis Diaz after he misses 3-0 win over Nottingham Forest following shocking news of parents' kidnapping: "The best thing we could do for our brother was win the game and maybe distract him a little bit. All the rest was super-negative."
Monday 30 October 2023 15:22, UK
Jurgen Klopp delivered an emotional tribute to the absent Luis Diaz after Liverpool's win over Nottingham Forest which the forward missed due to his parents' kidnapping.
Klopp called the afternoon the "most difficult circumstance" he had ever worked in after the news broke overnight on Sunday that both Diaz's parents had been kidnapped in his native Colombia.
The player's mother has since been released, but his father remains missing.
Diaz had been due to start the game at Anfield and was replaced in the Liverpool line-up by Diogo Jota, who held up a 'Diaz 7' shirt after scoring the opener in their 3-0 win.
"We played in the most difficult circumstance I've ever had," Klopp told Sky Sports. "It was a really difficult day, which ended with a good result.
"The best thing we could do for our brother was that we win the game and distract him a little bit maybe, all the rest was super special in the most negative understanding. After more than 1,000 games you would think you have experienced everything, but no.
"But it's not about us, it's about 'Lucho' and his family, and we all pray and hope that everything will be fine. What we can do, we will do, we've done already in the club and the only thing we could do today was fight for their brother - and that's what they did."
He later added in his press conference: "How can you make a football game important on a day like this? I've never struggled with that in my life. It was always my safe place, sometimes my hiding place. In this 90 minutes you are allowed to focus just on that - but it was absolutely impossible to do that today.
"It was clear we had to give the game extra sense, which was fighting for Lucho. I was not 100 per cent prepared for the shirt when they pulled it out, which was a really touching moment.
"We heard late last night about it. We spoke to Lucho to go home, sent people with him, and have people with him to take care of him. Part of his family is there, then we had the news about his mum which is fantastic, and since then nothing really.
"We are not the first people who get informed, but we try to have knowledge of everything as much as we can. We don't want to disturb in any way, we just want to support."
Jota made the most of his role of starter in circumstances he would never have wished for, and paid tribute to his friend and team-mate Diaz after the game.
"Luis was with us in the hotel last night when he heard the news, it's unimaginable to think about the situation like this," he told Sky Sports. "I played instead of him, and I just remembered to do something as well like as a team to show him we're with him, and hopefully things work out well in the end."
Analysis by South American Football Expert Tim Vickery:
"This is a huge trauma for Colombian society. These kind of kidnappings, if you go back a few years, they were going at a rate of about 4000 per year when the FARC guerillas were using them to raise funds.
"I remember my first time in Colombia for the 2001 Copa America, the first time Colombia had ever staged anything like this, and it nearly did not go ahead as a senior member of the Colombia FA was kidnapped shortly before the tournament. Argentina did not turn up at the last moment, Mauro Silva, the Brazil international, checked in at Rio airport, then got scared and decided not to go and then at Bogota airport his suitcase was rather pathetically going round the carousel.
"And these kind of events are a real trauma for Colombian society - the Colombians were so happy that anyone had gone there to see Colombia with their own eyes and come to the conclusion there were many other things that were great about Colombia, not just the negative headlines that people read about in newspapers.
"Since then, the number of kidnappings have gone down and down and down to around 200 a year, but Colombia is in trauma today because yet again, the world is reading about Colombia for negative reasons.
"This is a very, very worrying time obviously for Luis Diaz and his family. There is always the fear, as happened further north in Honduras a few years ago, to the brother of the then Tottenham midfielder Wilson Palacios, that the kidnappers decide just to cut their losses and anything could happen then.
"Unfortunately, it is the very success and the riches he accumulates from that success that makes him a target for this type of nefarious operation."
