Cape Verde’s Sidny Lopes Cabral: ‘If you’re like “oh, it’s Messi”, you’re gonna lose your mind’

The full-back on defying the odds, dealing with racism, Cape Verde’s party people and taking on Lionel Messi “When we saw 1%, we just laughed.” Cape Verde liked those odds, and so did Sidny Lopes Cabral. “They gave us a 1% chance of reaching the next round, but we showed how big 1% is,” the defender says. He has always known there was a chance however small it looked, in Rotterdam or anywhere: in Germany, where he froze in the fifth tier earning £850 a month, using bin bags for curtains, and in America too. His mates told him he was crazy; he told his mum not to worry. “I always told them, ‘he

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