Cape Verde's win in Portugal will reverberate and be remembered
Portugal's coach, Fernando Santos, who last summer took Greece to the last 16 of the World Cup, made as brave a fist of it as anybody could have done, his dour face even saggier than usual. "We did some positive things," he said, "especially in the second half, and even when we had 10 players they couldn't get to our goal. They were looking for a goal and we could have reduced the deficit." Some relief, then: Portugal pluckily held out to lose only 2-0 to a country with a population 21 times smaller than their own, many of whose players are scattered through the lower reaches of the Portuguese league.
Santos did acknowledge that it wasn't all good news. "The first half had some negative aspects," he said. "We lacked speed and doing tricks isn't enough. We lacked aggression and it looked like an exhibition game, when we knew that the game was going to be difficult because it was against a Portuguese-speaking country."
Cape Verde's opener, scored seven minutes before half-time, was freakish, a cross from Odaïr Fortes, the Reims right-wing, floating over Anthony Lopes in the Portugal goal and in at the back post. But although there was an element of luck about the finish, Vitorino Antunes was muscled off the ball far too easily in the buildup. Five minutes later Héldon, who is on loan at Córdoba from Sporting, clipped a free-kick across goal from a similar position wide on the right and with both goalkeeper and defence slow to react, Gegé turned the ball in from a couple of yards. It was inexcusably sloppy.
When the centre-back André Pinto was sent off on the hour for a wild challenge on Héldon, Portugal's fate was sealed. "The national team is worth more than that," said the forward Ukra, who came on at half-time. "It's true that it was a warm-up game but we wanted to win. We have to lift our heads."
Portugal have made a habit of losing form and focus between tournaments, needing play-offs to make the past two World Cups and Euro 2012, but, after a 2-1 home win over Serbia on Sunday they sit top of their qualifying group for Euro 2016 despite losing their opening game at home to Albania. With Serbia docked the three points they were awarded after their abandoned game against Albania, when a drone carrying a provocative flag sparked crowd trouble in Belgrade, qualifying - even without a play-off - shouldn't present too much of an issue.
This was probably an aberration, the result of an inexperienced side not taking their opponents seriously enough. Nonetheless, there is a vulnerability to Portugal, a tendency to lose games they wouldn't expect to, and it has existed for almost a decade.
And it would be wrong, too, to dismiss the achievement ofCape Verde, particularly given how disappointing they were at the Africa Cup of Nations in January, when they played grimly unadventurous football - admittedly on the unhelpful pitch in Ebebiyín - drawing all three of their group games while scoring a single goal. In 2013, under the air-traffic controller and José Mourinho protegé Lúcio Antunes, they played brisk, uncomplicated football and were unfortunate to go out in the quarter-final to Ghana.
Antunes accepted an offer from the Angolan club Progresso do Sambizanga, for whom Cape Verde's goalkeeper Vozinha plays, in December 2013 and was replaced by the former Benfica striker Rui Águas. The sense in Equatorial Guinea was that Cape Verde's moment had perhaps passed, but Águas has stayed on, and victory in Estoril suggests there may be depth to Cape Verde's improvement. The use of the erratic CSKA Sofia creator Platini, used so sparingly at the Cup of Nations, to the right of a midfield three, perhaps suggested Águas is embracing a less cautious future.
Most encouragingly, of the 19-man squad in Portugal on Tuesday night, 14 were born in Cape Verde. There have been efforts to trawl Europe for eligible players of Cape Verdean descent, but the majority of the squad have been developed at home. One high-profile coach at the Cup of Nations spoke dismissively of Equatorial Guinea as a "foreign legion" made up of "mercenaries" happy to accept a passport in exchange for financial reward and international football; the accusation could not be applied to Cape Verde.
"This was like a tournament game for us," said Águas, "and we had the luck we were missing at the Cup of Nations. We could have done more, but we showed more motivation and we came out happy."
The key now is to ensure the momentum is carried into the qualifying series for the 2017 Cup of Nations, which begins in June.
