Cape Verde pulled off an incredible result by drawing with the European champions on Monday night. Here are the numbers behind the shock of the World Cup so far.
One of the many issues that has been raised with this World Cup has been that the expanded format would bring the overall quality of the tournament down. By increasing the number of sides involved from 32 to 48, there has been some concern that we’d end up with too many poor teams.
The feared result of this, it has been suggested, would be too many one-sided fixtures, too many gulfs in quality, which would lead to a lack of competitiveness in the group stages.
When the draw was made, this fixture, between Spain and Cape Verde, would have been highlighted early on as a contender to be one of those very games. And after Germany put seven past Curaçao on Sunday, there was plenty of expectation that this one could be even more unbalanced.
Everyone, understandably, expected a comfortable Spain win. The European champions, ranked second in the FIFA world rankings before the game, were facing World Cup debutants, who kicking it with the likes of Honduras, the United Arab Emirates and North Macedonia down in 67th in the rankings.
Cape Verde, with a population of around half a million, had become the second-least populous nation ever to qualify for a World Cup when they confirmed their place in this competition (only to be later overtaken by Curaçao). Spain, meanwhile, have long been a giant of world football.
In 25,000 pre-match simulations of this bout run by the Opta supercomputer, Spain were victorious 87.2% of the time. Cape Verde got a draw just 8.1% of the time.
But against the odds, the minnows shut their frustrated opponents out to earn a truly remarkable and genuinely historic goalless draw. In their first ever World Cup match, they avoided defeat against the team who won the European Championship only two years ago.
Predictably, Cape Verde didn’t put in the most adventurous of attacking performances. Unsurprisingly, Spain had most of the ball, ending the game with 74.2% possession and a field tilt – which compares the number of passes completed in the attacking thirds of the pitch – of 96.7%. In other words, Spain completely dominated both possession and territory.
Cape Verde did try to attack, but they just couldn’t keep hold of the ball and get anywhere near the Spain goal with any kind of regularity. They had just four shots totalling 0.07 xG before the 90th minute, after which point Spain had lost all shape as they threw players forward to try and find a winner. Cape Verde centre-back Vozinha, was the star of the show. He saved all seven of the shots on target he faced, meaning that, at 40 years and 12 days old, he became the third-oldest goalkeeper to keep a clean sheet in a World Cup match, after Peter Shilton (40 years, 281 days) and Dino Zoff (40 years, 130 days). Meanwhile, the only goalkeeper aged 40+ to make more saves in a World Cup game on record (since 1966) was Pat Jennings, on his 41st birthday, for Northern Ireland against Brazil in 1986 (10).
It wasn’t a win, but this was still as historic a result as they come. The 65-place difference between the sides is the biggest for any team that avoided defeat in a World Cup game (rankings were first published in 1993).
An incredible performance and an even more incredible result, which has, single-handedly, proven that there was no need to worry about the mismatches at this 48-team World Cup.
How Cape Verde Frustrated Spain to Record One of the World Cup’s Most Historic Results Opta Analyst.
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