Written off by pundits going into their match against Uruguay – Williams and Benni McCarthy on BBC One both predicted they would lose – Cape Verde refused to follow the script.<\/p>\n
A gift led to the second goal which drew the scores level, but Helio Varela did well regardless to produce a deft touch to take the ball past the stranded Muslera before stroking it into the back of the net.<\/p>\n
After that, Cape Verde showed the defensive strength that made the difference against Spain to be able to hold on to a point.<\/p>\n
They made sure to combine it with their attacking threat, though, and continued to hunt for a way to snatch three points.<\/p>\n
It was a performance which led former South Africa striker McCarthy to say he has a “new lease of respect” for Cape Verde, and ex-Wales defender Williams to claim it was the “most entertaining” game he has covered at the World Cup so far.<\/p>\n
“They really came out to play,” said McCarthy. “They were sensational. I thought they were brave.<\/p>\n
“The only thing that’s needed is working on their final-third entry, that composure, working on those decisions in the final moment of the game. I think they’ve won a lot of people’s hearts after this performance.”<\/p>\n
One Cape Verde fan told BBC Sport at a fan park in the US that “everybody doubted us, everybody thought we weren’t going to make it. We’re here now”.<\/p>\n
Such a reaction captures the feeling currently surrounding Cape Verde, who are fast becoming one of the best stories of this year’s World Cup. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Written off by pundits going into their match against Uruguay – Williams and Benni McCarthy on BBC One…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":752113,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-752112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/752112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=752112"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/752112\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/752113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=752112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=752112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=752112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}