An obviously sentimental After being substituted from Saturday’s Premier League match against Arsenal due to a knee injury, Luis Diaz was on the verge of tears.

With just one hour played, the 26-year-old Colombian winger—who missed the whole of the previous campaign due to knee surgery—must have been worried.

Harvey Elliott took Diaz’s position shortly after the alleged “painful” accident, in which Diaz was observed clutching his left knee.

He may have had terrible flashbacks to an injury that kept him out for the majority of the 2022–2023 season because he seemed upset while sitting by Liverpool colleague Curtis Jones on the bench.

For Diaz, this has been such a difficult time. His parents were abducted in October while riding their motorcycles from their Barrancas house by armed assailants.

After the Colombian attorney general’s office put up a team of investigators to search for the couple, his mother, Cilenis Marulanda, was saved.

Then, following a gunfight between the kidnappers and the Colombian police, the player’s father, Luis Manuel Diaz, was freed after a torturous week of uncertainty.

According to local media in the La Guajira region, two of the four kidnappers were killed during a police rescue operation that liberated Diaz’s father.

Later, in stoppage time against Luton, Diaz made a heartfelt comeback to the Liverpool first team, scoring the equalizer.

There hasn’t been much of an effect from the former FC Porto winger since that match against Luton.

Actually, Jamie Carragher, a former Liverpool defender, claims that Diaz appears to be “a shadow of himself” as he continues to battle with consistency.

After Liverpool’s 1-1 tie with Arsenal, Carragher said on The Gary Neville Podcast: “Diaz just looks like a shadow of himself since those knee injuries he had last season.”

“Diaz, especially on that left side, has to have a really big second half of the season or I’m sure Liverpool will be going into the market in the summer,” the player said. “Obviously, he’s had family problems this season.”

When asked if Diaz was hurt, the German answered, “Hopefully not. He was in anguish; it was knee on knee, and we wanted to change twice at that precise moment before Lucho passed out.

We actually intended to wait to see if Lucho needed to be taken off, but we ultimately changed all three as we could no longer wait for Lucho to be as he is.

“We play in three days, and you never know how quickly the turnaround is, so we’ll have to see,” Lucho said to me. The physios weren’t too concerned. I’m not sure.