Cape Verde Islands Football Team Celebrating Victory Over the Saudis

Today I watched an amazing match between the football teams of Argentina and the Cape Verde Islands. Earlier, I thought the existence of the Cape Verde team in the elimination rounds of the 2026 World Cup was a fluke.

Well, it was no fluke. Argentina played well, and they scored a goal in the first half. But then Cape Verde was playing just as well, and they managed to equalize. This led to an additional thirty-minute period being added. I had to stop watching at that point, because I wanted to cook up a pot of Spanish Rice for dinner.

Toward the end of cooking, I switched on the television and saw that the score was tied 2-2. Within seconds, Argentina scored again, and the valiant Cape Verde team struggled to equalize within the last minutye bor two of the extra period. They couldn’t, and the final score was 3-2 for Argentina.

I am a fan of the Argentina club. Over the years, I have visited Argentina three times and saw large swaths of the country from Iguazu Falls across the border from Brazil in the North to Ushuaia in the South, a scant 600 miles from Antarctica.

At the end of the game, as I saw the sadness of the Cape Verdeans and the jubilation of the Argentinians, I thought I would have been equally happy if the score was the other way around. In the fight between David and Goliath, it is not surprising at the support David gets.

Unfortunately, in the elimination stages, one side wins; and the other side packs their bags and returns home. I think when the Cape Verdeans return home, they will be treated as heroes. They had an incredible run, discomfiting strong teams such as Spain and Uruguay along the way.

I think we’ll be seeing more of them.