On the Verde of Greatness

Never in the history of the game have Argentina fans been so conflicted after winning a game. Hell, never in the history of the game have Argentina <players> looked so sheepish after winning a game.

When I turned on the TV half an hour into the match at 4 a.m., groggy and without glasses, I saw the Argentinians in their away jerseys playing a tight passing midfield game. Except, once I put my glasses on, I realised that the men in dark blue weren’t Argentinians, but Cabo Verdeans.

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When Leo Messi popped in the first goal in the 29th min, trapping the ball and then flicking it with the outside of his left foot into the Cabo Verde net, the questions steaming out of Miami were ‘How many more will Argentina pump in?’ ‘Will Messi get his hattrick in the first half, or distribute his goals across 90 minutes?’

But that line of easy questioning quickly moved on to what turned out to be a duel between Messi and Vozinha, the tournament standout and giant-stopper. This was, however, going to be much more than a one-on-one Gunfight at the Hard Rock Corral, in which, despite the first goal, Vozinha seemed to be coming up tops. A cross from Ryan Mendes had Deroy Duarte floor the ball past St Emiliano Martínez, Saviour of Argentina in 2022. 1-1.

In the 62nd min, when Vozinha came out to save a Messi shot off a Thiago Almada through ball, the Hector-Achilles battle was reaching its apogee. Sure enough, 10 mins later, a Messi free-kick from the edge of the box curling towards the top left corner was stabbed away by Vozinha like Bernardo with a switchblade in West Side Story.

With the scoreline still poised at 1-1 like a ballerina dancing en pointe, the last 5 mins of regulation time—the muddy dead zone where valiant underdogs from Ivory Coast and Japan to Senegal and DR Congo have gone down in the last few weeks—came across as Cape Verde ships attempting to cross Hormuz in May.

The sudden calm of the full-time whistle was illusory. But even after Lisandro Martinez had punched a hole into the Cabo Verde net from a loose ball from an Argentina corner 3 min into extra time, the unsettling parity was hardly disturbed. In fact, even from in front of the TV screen, you could detect the polyurethane smell of another goal in the air. The only question was whether Argentina was going to extend their lead to 3-1, or Cabo Verde would make it 2-2 and reboot the scoreline.

And the reboot came. And how. Sidny Lopes Cabral gets the ball on the left lane, turns past an Argentine defender as if dodging a badly driven auto, waits, aims and curls in an absolute divine shot that even an outstretched god on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel—never mind Dibu Martinez—has no chance of stopping.

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Scores precariously level in the second half of extra time, you realise that this is no David and Goliath contest you are witnessing, but something far more evenly matched, like what the original Second Book of Samuel describes: ‘There was another battle with the Philistines at Gob, and Elhanan, son of Jaare-oregim the Bethlemite killed Goliath the Gittite, the shaft of whose spear was like a weaver’s beam.’ And Cabral’s 14 min extra time stunner was that ‘shaft of whose spear was like a weaver’s beam’.

In the end—the actual end was a blur of Cabo Verdean attacks to both score and expand time—Cristian Romero’s swivel of a head brushing off centre back Diney with 10 minutes left for the final whistle did the trick. But the treat of this extraordinary match came from Cabo Verde.

Vozinha plays for 2nd division Portuguese club Chaves. Goalscorers Duarte and Cabral play for Bulgarian 1st division side Ludogorets and Turkish Super League club Trabzonspor, respectively. Cabo Verde’s exceptionalism lay in the fact that in the whole 120 mins of play, never once did they make us think that they came to this World Cup bereft of a great footballing tradition. On Saturday, in Miami, we witnessed Cabo Verde invent tradition—even as they lost to a very fortunate, three-time World Cup-winning side.