Cape Verde Stun Spain With a Goalless World Cup Draw
Spain had 27 shots and could not score. Cape Verde, in their first World Cup, held the European champions 0-0 behind a 40-year-old goalkeeper's heroics.
The shock of the World Cup so far came without a single goal. Cape Verde, playing in their first World Cup, held the European champions Spain to a 0-0 draw in Atlanta on Monday, one of the great upsets in the competition’s history.
It should not have been close. Spain peppered the Cape Verde goal with 27 shots to their opponents’ six, hitting the target seven times, and still could not score. The reason wore gloves: 40-year-old goalkeeper Vozinha produced a stream of saves, denying Mikel Oyarzabal, Aymeric Laporte and Ferran Torres, who also struck the crossbar with Spain’s best chance of the night.
For Spain, European champions and winners in 2010, it was a jarring start, a reminder that possession and shot counts do not always become goals. For Cape Verde, an Atlantic archipelago of about half a million people, a point against one of the world’s best teams will stand as the greatest result in their footballing history, sealed before a disbelieving crowd.
Spain dominated from the first whistle, knocking the ball around the edge of the Cape Verde box and waiting for an opening that never quite came. They controlled possession and pushed numbers forward, the chances piled up, and each time a defender threw himself in front of the shot or Vozinha got a hand to it. By the closing stages the Spanish frustration was plain to see.
The draw reshapes Group H before it has properly begun. Spain, overwhelming favourites to top the group, now sit level on a point with a debutant they were expected to dispatch, and in the expanded 48-team format, where finishing position shapes the knockout path, the margin for error just narrowed. Cape Verde, long an outsider in world football, will believe a point can become more.
It capped a group stage that keeps refusing to respect reputations, after Japan twice pegged back the Netherlands and Germany ran riot against Curaçao. Spain have time to recover, and the quality to do so. But on this first evidence, Group H will be no procession.
