Despite a relatively positive end to the season, it was a rather disappointing season for many at Liverpool but Diogo Jota has been speaking about the biggest blow he experienced in the past campaign.
Speaking with FourFourTwo, our No.20 said: “Not going to the World Cup was the hardest knock I’ve had. I deserved to be there”.
It’s easy for us to forget the toll that this must have taken on the forward after what could have easily been a career highlight, being so cruelly robbed from him due to the first mid-season World Cup, you can understand the frustration.
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Although the Qatar tournament will always be remembered as the first tournament to be played in the winter and for handing Lionel Messi his first world title, it did also become a tournament that robbed so many of a target they had been working to their whole lives.
Players with small two or three-week injuries were forced to miss the competition all together but ordinarily they would have been given time to recover ahead of a major tournament.
Although the former Wolves man wasn’t experiencing a small fitness problem, his form at the end of the season shows that he would have been firing for any normal World Cup year.
You can really understand the bitterness at this outcome and let’s hope that the 26-year-old comes back using this anger as a positive for us next season.