Cape Verde hero Vozinha’s mother could not afford visa fees for World Cup

“She didn’t manage to be here because of the visa. Because of the money you have to pay for the visa, we didn’t manage on time. I would like her to be here,” he sighed, clutching the player of the match memento as though it were a slice of his soul.

Emotion took over. “I cried after the game because I grew up with my grandparents when I was a kid, and they could not be there. They passed away a few years ago,” he told reporters. He was attached to his grandmother — and that’s how his club-mates started calling him Josimar José Évora Dias “Vozinha”. In Creole, Vozinha means grandma.

Initially he was unhappy, as he thought they were making fun of him, but later he voluntarily adopted the name.

The maiden name Josimar was a tribute to his father’s favourite player, the Brazilian right back.

He turned 40 a week before the tournament, the oldest debutant in the World Cup. The footballing journey of Cape Verde and Vozinha reflect each other. The third smallest country to play the World Cup, it’s a collection of 10 islands, ten dots off the West African coast with a meagre population of 529,000. When Vozinha grew up, in the tiny island of Sao Vicente, the country did not have a structured league, or local heroes to fire their imagination, or the drive and direction. He was 25 by the time he became a professional, a career that took him from Cape Verde to nondescript leagues in Cyprus, Angola, Moldova and Slovakia, before he joined the Portuguese second division side Desportivo de Chaves.

Putting on a smile, he remembered the journey: “I would tell 18-year-old Vozinha to be really proud of himself. He worked a lot. To be honest I never dreamt of stuff like this when I was a kid, but after this game I can tell my younger version that it was all worth it,” he reflected.

He nearly missed the World Cup, after the younger Bruno Varela was promoted as first choice. “I was thinking of stopping with the national team. All my team-mates talked to me, they encouraged me to stay because of the World Cup. I stayed because of that, because it was my dream, the dream of all of us,” he told Goalkeeper.com.

The Rock of Cape Verde, a commentator called him. None of Spain’s celebrated virtuous could breach his limbs, or will. The sharpest of them all came two minutes into the injury time in the first half, when he tipped Aymeric Laporte’s glancing heading from cannoning onto the far bottom corner. Minutes earlier, he had denied Mikel Oyarzabal a header that looped into him.

It was not only about the saves he made, or the reflexes he displayed, but his sheer presence and command in the box, his judgment when to rush and collect the ball, and when not to. Like a master auteur, he directed the defence, yelling at them sometimes, encouraging them when they made last-ditch interventions.

50K to 1.5 million followers

He became such an instant celebrity that local television CazéTV asked the audience to follow Vozinha’s official Instagram account, rather than subscribe to their channel. In an hour, his following touched 1.5 million followers, from a meagre 50,000 at the start of the game.

A battalion of lively fans, largely immigrants settled in Massachusetts (their third-choice keeper Carlos ‘CJ’ Dos Santos was born in the US), livened them up, matching in voice Spain’s perplexed supporters. Some of the players were luckier than Vozinha in having their relatives in the stands. Pico Lopes’s parents, Carlos and Judy, his brothers, and wife’s family had come down from Ireland, his mother’s country, for which he had turned up in age-group categories. His recruitment is part of the folklore— answering a LinkedIn invite he thought was a prank.

Small but smart

But their moment of glory was not an alignment of favourable stars. It originated from systematic planning, under the guidance of technical director Rui Costa, the former Portugal midfielder. The biggest challenge was population, but Cape Verdeans had spread around the world

Someone had to bring them together. So in 2019, the federation drew a list of every player of Cape Verdean descent playing in leagues abroad, watched each one of them and personally reached out to those that impressed them. The first name on the list was Ryan Mendes, the captain, who is a product of Paris’s famous Le Havre academy and once considered better than Paul Pogba and Riyad Mahrez.

The 25- member squad had those born in France, Ireland, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Portugal and Cape Verde. All 25 play for 25 different clubs in 16 different countries.

The biggest unifier was their language, a Cape Verdean dialect of Creole. Their families, wherever they went and whoever they assimilated with, preserved and passed on the language. Local music blared during practice sessions to strike a cultural chord.

With the funds from FIFA, they built a state-of-the-art stadium, the exact venue where they sealed their historic moment. The president wanted to name it after Pele, before someone told him that the Brazilian had never visited the country. Now, they could perhaps name it after Vozinha, the rock of Cape Verde for producing their most unforgettable hour yet in the World Cup.