“When we saw 1%, we just laughed.” Cape Verde liked those odds, and so did Sidny Lopes Cabral. “They gave us a 1% chance of reaching the next round, but we showed how big 1% is,” the defender says. He has always known there was a chance however small it looked, in Rotterdam or anywhere: in Germany, where he froze in the fifth tier earning £850 a month, using bin bags for curtains, and in America, too. His mates told him he was crazy; he told his mum not to worry. “I always told them: ‘Hey, I’m going to be a great football player: I’m gonna reach the top.’ And I’m living in my dream now.”
Now, the team representing a group of islands home to 500,000 people, the story of this World Cup, face the champions. And Lopes Cabral, the left-back and the second-youngest player in the squad at 23, faces arguably the best footballer of all time. “I hope I get some nice pictures of me standing next to him,” Lopes Cabral says. “I have no words to describe how I feel, how we all do. Back in Cape Verde, every game there are parties. In the Netherlands, in France, everywhere Cape Verdean people live. In Rotterdam it’s crazy.”
