Konate told the Independent<\/a>:\u00a0\u201cThere are low points, there\u2019s depression. You can suffer from depression in football too; there\u2019s no need to be ashamed to say so.<\/p>\n\u201cIt\u2019s true that I\u2019ve often heard players say they were suffering from depression and that fans or people on the outside didn\u2019t understand because they were earning a lot of money. But no, that\u2019s rubbish and you shouldn\u2019t say that.<\/p>\n
\u201cDepression is personal; it\u2019s deep inside you. When you\u2019re depressed, it starts in the heart, goes up to the brain and takes over your whole body. For me, that\u2019s what\u2019s hard, and we need to talk about it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Konate revealed the impact of the car crash which took Jota\u2019s life and that of his brother, Andre, just before the start of pre-season.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt devastated me. I didn\u2019t have any interest in anything else at that point,\u201d Konate admitted.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou go back to football because you have no choice. We\u2019re employees at a club that pays us every month, so we have duties. We had no choice but to go back on the field and play for him and his family \u2013 as well as ourselves. There\u2019s no way of getting over it, but you learn to live with it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018I didn\u2019t know what to do\u2019<\/p>\n
While the squad mourned Jota, Konate\u2019s father was fighting a severe illness before passing away in January.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t know what to do,\u201d Konate said. \u201cI didn\u2019t know whether I should go home and stop playing, because the team needed me too.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t know who to talk to about it, so I kept it all to myself. And this is the advice I\u2019d give to everyone: when you\u2019re feeling down or something\u2019s going on, you need to talk to those around you. It can help you and do you good. I didn\u2019t talk about it and kept it to myself.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe doctors then told us he didn\u2019t have long to live, but we didn\u2019t know it would happen so quickly.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was never a moment when I felt like I was on the mend. All of these tragic events happened so quickly and as soon as I felt like I was getting my head above water, something else happened.<\/p>\n
\u201cI also had to learn how to get back on my feet on my own because the team needed me more than ever and I know that my father would have wanted me to get back.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Liverpool star Ibrahima Konate has opened up on how the deaths of Diogo Jota and his father \u201cdevastated\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":481553,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[38998,914,42,13716,1101,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-481552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-diogo-jota","tag-front-page","tag-headlines","tag-ibrahima-konate","tag-liverpool","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=481552"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481552\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/481553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=481552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=481552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=481552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}