animation with different sprite images

hey all so in my game i have a ball as the player but i want to set different images to it so that the user can choose witch ball he want and i pretty much managed to do this... but when i set an animation to the player that is triggered when he's dead, but if the animation is enabled i can't change the ball image so is there a way to overwrite the animation or should i just disable it ???

Detailed:

i have a ball as the player as i said with an animation component that turned the ball grey when dead and it was working fine but then i wanted to add an option to change the ball image using this code in the script :

 public sprite blue; 
 
 void update(){
 this.gameObject.GetComponent<SpriteRenderer> ().sprite = blue;
  }

but when the animation is on this don't make any changes to the image