EPL TALK: Luis Diaz shows us what a dignified hero looks like

LUIS Diaz silenced the whining. For now. The whiners will inevitably return this weekend, to self-combust over the latest VAR blunder. But until then, we should all pipe down for a bit.

All it needed was a T-shirt. The most reliable of football gestures. The hidden T-shirt has long been the notice board of choice for the elite footballer. A new club. A new partner. A new baby. A new life. All positive messages and photos are welcome.

Occasionally, these unveiled dedications take on a sombre tone. A tribute to an ailing icon, perhaps, or an ode to a lost loved one. But they are rarely a note to a lost father. And they are never a desperate plea to kidnappers.

Diaz’s T-shirt read Libertad para Papa. Freedom for Dad. In a moment of collective joy, he reminded us of his personal suffering.

The Liverpool forward’s father was kidnapped at gunpoint last month, reportedly by guerrillas of the National Liberation Army in Colombia.

At the time of the Reds’ kick-off at Luton Town, Diaz’s father had still not been released. Diaz had not been expected to play. The decision was his alone. Neither Jurgen Klopp nor Liverpool could assume he was in the right frame of mind to participate because they had no clue. Refreshingly, both coach and club acknowledged their cluelessness.

In the perpetually irate world of the English Premier League, everyone knows everything now.

Grey areas went out when the VAR cameras came in. Today, everything is black and white. The officials were right to award Newcastle United’s goal against Arsenal. Mikel Arteta was right to call the decision-making “disgraceful”. And Arsenal’s statement made it clear that their manager was right to criticise the “unacceptable refereeing”.

But Jamie Carragher and Gary Neville, among many other football writers (including this one), believe that Arsenal were wrong to release a statement, wrong to publicly attack officials and wrong to demand action whenever a human error goes against their club.

And now, they’re all screaming on social media, participating in the usual distribution of prejudiced bile, every Monday morning, regular as clockwork, as the relevant tribal bases rage from their silos. It’s anti-Arsenal bias! It’s weak refereeing! It’s VAR over-emphasising every dodgy detail! It’s a war on technology, or diving forwards, or something or other, but it’s definitely a war. The default position is anger.

But there’s only one man currently making his living in the EPL who has a legitimate reason to turn every waking, horrific hour into a sustained primal scream. Diaz’s father is missing.

That’s a grown-up reason to be furious, not a fabricated one for YouTube clicks. Of course, we don’t understand Diaz’s fury. We’ll try to empathise, but our comparatively protected family circumstances make it impossible to hazard a guess at Diaz’s current mental state.

Silencing all the superficial fury

We can do superficial fury. Arteta being “sick” at Newcastle’s goal? That’s our cue. Bring on the rage. Throw in Sheffield United’s dodgy penalty against Wolves, and Darwin Nunez’s rare ability to hit every available target on offer except the one that guarantees a goal, and that’s more than enough to burst a blood vessel and splatter the fan forums.

Diaz would be in no mood to submit himself to such trivial nonsense, surely, watching grown men make hyperbolic statements about “disgraceful” VAR decisions and sounding like teenagers complaining about an underwhelming meal.

But the 26-year-old made himself available for selection. He came on in the 83rd minute to remind Nunez that there was this big thing with white sticks and he might try to find it once in a while. Diaz did just that. He salvaged a point for Liverpool, which meant everything, until he revealed the shirt underneath, and the game immediately meant nothing.

But it does. Of course it does. For a few minutes, the game offered Diaz what it provides for the rest of us every week. A little refuge from the mundane and the ordinary. For Diaz, his time on the pitch took him away from the horrific and the extraordinary, as it did for Gary Lineker, when his baby son was rushed to hospital with leukaemia, more than 30 years ago.

Lineker continued to play for Tottenham Hotspur back then, because matches offered a brief respite from the pain, in his words. Football is not a matter of life and death. But it can offer an emollient touch for both. It’s no cure for anything. But it helps.

At its best, football really should be trivial, in the way that Ukraine, Gaza, climate change, political polarisation and the tense situation between the Colombian Government and the National Liberation Army are not. Diaz’s T-shirt was a reminder never to confuse the two.

The EPL is too often an incendiary place, particularly online. Club statements that savage officials and demand apologies do not help. The VAR check for Newcastle’s goal did take too long. But was it worth getting that angry about it? Must we really be so mad so often?

Thankfully, Diaz silenced all that fake fury with one beautiful, humbling gesture. He doesn’t care about VAR. He just wants his Dad back.

Hopefully, they’ll be reunited soon. And then Diaz will be able to return to the trivial stuff. Just like the rest of us. But until then, it’s never a bad idea in an environment increasingly fuelled by manufactured hysteria to reserve our outrage for the things that actually matter.

Neil Humphreys is an award-winning football writer and a best-selling author, who has covered the English Premier League since 2000 and has written 28 books.

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