Really sad and shocking news this week with the passing of Liverpool player Diogo Jota and his brother André Silva, who were involved in a car crash in Spain on Thursday morning.
The 28-year-old Portugal international and his brother, 25, were both killed when their Lamborghini suffered a tyre blow out while overtaking another car and immediately burst into flames moments after the collision.
The photos from the accident look absolutely horrific, and make it clear that there’s no way the brothers stood a chance of surviving the crash.
What makes the whole thing even sadder is that Jota had just married Rute Cardoso, the mother of his three children, and described himself as the luckiest man in the world in his final Instagram post on Wednesday afternoon.
Rute shared their wedding photos in a social media post the day before the crash and said: ‘My dream come true.’ Jota replied in the comments: ‘I’m the lucky one.’
It also transpires that Diogo Jota’s fatal car crash came after he was advised by doctors not to fly following surgery on his lung. The Liverpool forward and his brother were heading to the norther Spanish port city of Santander to catch a ferry and reach the UK where they’d continue their journey to Liverpool with the car.
According to CNN Portugal: ‘The surgery he had had was lung surgery and he had been advised against flying following this.’
Another Portuguese journalist, Victor Pinto told the country’s CMTV channel: ‘Diogo Jota sometimes chose to travel by road because he had some pulmonary discomfort, nothing serious, and as we know, there is a ferry boat that connects the south of England to Spain’s Cantabria region.
‘The information we have is that he was going to take a ferry to Santander, so this means it wasn’t exactly a road trip from England to Portugal.
‘In this case, Diogo Jota would have made the ferry trip with his brother.’
The road where the tragic accident occured has been described as ‘one of the worst routes in Spain’ – the A-52. The roads are apparently in poor condition, there is a lack of safety barriers, and constant roadworks.
There’s a lot of needless speculation online about whether the Jota brothers were driving too fast, or whether it was necessary to overtake the car in front of them, but at the end of the day, a tyre blow out is unbelievably unlucky and this was simply a horrific accident that no one could have seen coming.
View this post on Instagram
RIP to Diogo and André Silva. Our thoughts are with their family and friends.
