Cape Verde shock Spain with historic draw on World Cup debut

Wow, just wow. At 1.57pm, Atlanta time, 3,291 miles from home, the final whistle went on Cape Verde’s first ever World Cup game, and they had only gone and done it.

What they had done was madness: a tiny nation, a debutant, had held one of the favourites, Spain, the European champions, to a 0-0 draw. Bubista, the coach who had led them here had said that he wanted the world to see who and what they are and, boy, did they see. Qualification, he had insisted, was more than football, it was music, it was culture, it was everything. So what was this? This was wonderful. What a moment and what a noise greeted the moment when the impossible had become real.