If you are a player, will you believe that you receive a call from the national team coach in LinkedIn (a well-known recruitment platform)? Roberto Lopes, a defender for Irish side Shamrock Rovers, was once treated as spam, thankful to have finally seized the opportunity, and a semi-professional player who worked as a mortgage consultant a few years ago is now on his way to the Africa Cup of Nations.
It all starts with Roberto López's family background, as Carlos, the crew father from Cape Verde, met his mother Julie in Ireland, so even though he had played for the Irish U-19, he was still eligible to wear a Cape Verde suit. In 2016, when he was playing semi-professionally for Bohemians, his teammate Ayman Ben Mohamed, who was also born in Ireland, was unexpectedly called up in Tunisia, and when he was interviewed, he half-jokingly mentioned that he also had the right to represent another African team, Cape Verde, and an enthusiastic journalist copied down notes and tried to inform the CAPE Verde FA staff, which was not enough.
Roberto López then switched to Shamrock Rovers, helping the team to dominate the domestic Irish FA Cup in 2019, and in the same year, he opened a long-abandoned LinkedIn account at the university and received a message in Portuguese, because he did not understand the words and treated it as spam without much research, until 9 months later he received another English question "Have you considered my previous invitation?" He hastily translated the last email only to find that it was sent by rui Aguas, then coach of Cape Verde, saying that he was recruiting new recruits for the national team, so he invited Roberto López to transfer to play.
Despite the initial language barrier, Roberto López was determined to make a new attempt, making his debut for Cape Verde in a friendly match against Togo in 2019, and then assisting the team in qualifying for the third time in its history to qualify for the finals with two wins and four draws in The African Cup of Nations qualifiers, Group F. "Every time I visit a new country, such as Rwanda, Mozambique, etc., where you never dreamed of traveling, I look at the different visas on my passport and think that I am really lucky."
Indeed, in order to enhance their strength, many African second- and third-tier national teams have beckoned to the players who have been "diaspora", settled in Europe and played for local teams (for example, the Comoros, which has many Ligue 1 soldiers in the squad, finally broke through to play in the African Cup of Nations for the first time), and Cape Verde's three appearances in the African Cup of Nations have occurred in the past eight years, and the recent achievements seem to reflect the progress of this former Portuguese colony with a population of only more than 500,000, and most of the players from Portugal and the Netherlands. While Group A opponents include hosts Cameroon, Burkina Faso and Ethiopia, the 29-year-old defender nicknamed Pico (meaning powerful) is still "shouting" a strong group out, whether it is bluffing garbage news or a real war book, so watch out for Ethiopia's performance on the opening day of January 9.