The bar is no more than a narrow hall. There is barely enough space between the stools and the wall to walk through to a larger room at the back. Beyond the drawn curtains separating the spaces, two musicians are conducting a mic check before rows of mostly empty chairs. No one is paying attention to them; everyone is glued to the saloon television, which was specifically installed for the World Cup.

A bartender announces the next performance. A piano-and-vocals duo will be playing updates of Latin American nueva canción and tunes of kindred nobility from Cape Verde. The setlist was presumably designed to complement the game, which should have ended by now. Instead, the island nation—debutants, the second-smallest competing country, a squad largely drawn from diaspora, including one player recruited via LinkedIn—have taken the reigning champions, Argentina, into extra time.

We are invited to gather our drinks and relocate to the back room. Chair legs creak and arms ruffle tote bags for two agonizing minutes. Ultimately almost no one moves. When a bartender mutes the television out of decency to the artists, a muffled gasp of dismay goes up.

Now we abandon our principles with exuberance, even righteousness. An auntie wonders why a show was booked during such an important match. In her preamble, the vocalist stresses the enduring relevance of nueva canción and ponders the multifarious significance of the term sodade (longing for home, nostalgia for the pre-imperial past, island epistemology, general spiritual melancholy, et cetera). The audience score: five for music, maybe thirty-five for sports. 

Ibou, a soft-spoken bartender, is from Lumumbashi.¹ I learned this during the group stage, when the Democratic Republic of Congo were setting one national precedent after another: first World Cup goal, first point, first knockout appearance clinched. In the spirit of cross-cultural understanding, I enquired about the dashing celebration led by Yoane Wissa: hands spread apart in both directions, the right rising far higher than the left, before meeting again near the waist. Was it connected to traditional drumming? “No, man,” he set me straight. “It is a beating, a whooping.”

He is supporting Argentina, which I find unconscionable. What happened to standing up for underdogs? To pan-African unity? “Not Argentina,” Ibou clarifies. “I’m for Messi.” A few others admit to the same disposition. “If I could transfer Messi to Cape Verde, I would,” the guy behind me offers. He is met with glares from the newly minted Cape Verde fans. Our Messi is Vozinha, the forty-year-old goalkeeper, who made seven saves in an opener against the European champions, Spain. Few of us could name another player.

An already tense game is made tenser still by the unusual audiovisual configuration. Instead of the crowd noise—which has been noticeably lacking in this gold-plated edition—or the oafish American commentary, the players are accompanied by the unseen duo, who open with spare compositions by heroes of the left: Víctor Jara, Violeta Parra. Against these somber tributes to hope, to solidarity, to the future, the Argentine assault appears hectic, disjointed, petulant. In the absence of a proper ball-carrying midfielder—Enzo Fernández only comes to life when someone is defending beside him—they aim long for wingers, who run a few meters down the channels and then, what else: pass to Messi. Let no one claim this is an attractive brand of football.

The goal comes, as it increasingly does these days, from a corner. Or was it a cross? In any case the ball sails over the box, eluding wrestling attackers and defenders before finding its way to Lisandro Martínez, who has had a rough few years: if playing for Manchester United under the dour Dutchman Erik ten Hag were not taxing enough, successive injuries have almost ended his career three years in a row. All that turmoil is forgotten as he stops the ball dead, takes a touch to get it out of his feet, and rifles it into the roof of the net from a tight angle.

What explains the mysterious felicity that all footballers from the southern cone possess, even center-backs like Martínez? Eduardo Galeano’s explanations—the culture of the backstreets, sublimated anarchism—were always romantic and are now surely out of date. These gladiators are scouted in their preteens and paid millions. They are creatures of global capitalism. Messi earns more every five minutes he wears an Inter Miami shirt than Vozinha did all season in the Portuguese second division.

In their opening game against Spain, Cape Verde defended resolutely, fanatically, ontologically, to the point of abstaining from forward motion, or at least forward dribbling. In the closing stages, by which point their opponents were throwing the kitchen sink at them, they got a few openings to counterattack. Their strikers took wild and rather half-hearted shots from a distance, as if buying time to run back to defend. Against Uruguay, the team was more emboldened. At 2–2, they even pressed on for a third goal.

All the claptrap that the commentators—many of them decorated ex-players—say about the “power of belief” must actually mean something. How else to explain the way that Cape Verde rallied against an adversary ranked more than sixty places higher? Long throws and long balls gave way to spells of possession. Knocking about around the half-way line morphed into purposeful advances down the flanks. A flurry of corners and quarter chances were met with poorly suppressed shrieks and curses in the bar.

A friend pointed out that the duo behind the drawn curtain had turned, perhaps inevitably, to the Cesária Evora section of the evening. They were playing “Sodade,” her lilting, doom-laden, and definitive take on a 1950s island standard. The song draws its power from the tension between a polyrhythm that steadily murmurs forward (maracas under the drums) and a sung refrain—“I miss, I miss/I miss my hometown São Nicolau”—that forever reaches out, fails to grasp its resolution, then retreats to begin again. “No piece of music I know expresses longing for home more mournfully and movingly,” Yuri Slezkine recently wrote in Equator(where I am a benchwarmer). “Dedicated to the Cape Verdeans shipped to São Tome’s plantations, never to return.”

Then the tremendous curling effort—from outside the D!—that seemed to gather pace as it approached the top-right corner. A “tracer missile,” as the commentators say. Clutch beyond clutch. Maybe within reach of Yamal or Olise. But who in the world is Sidny Lopes Cabral? (A twenty-three-year-old left-back employed in the German fifth division not that long ago.) And why he is climbing so far into the stands? To hug his girlfriend? Good on him.

Decorum is suspended. Wild cries of joy. Chairs tumble. People jump up and down. Men crouch to the floor in relief; others lean their faces on the wall as if overcome with emotion. Ibou shakes his wrist in the universal gesture of admiration for footballing genius. (See Zidane at the touchline after Gareth Bale scored a bicycle kick in the 2018 Champions League final.) “Sodade” completed, the vocalist asks into the mic: “I take it Cape Verde scored?” 

Our elation, as everyone knows by now, was short-lived. Late in the first half of extra time, Cristian Romero—a superb center-back and reliable villain—restored the lead from another corner. The ball was technically diverted in by a Cape Verdean defender, but you need a heart of stone to call that an own goal. Believe it or not, the duo was playing Atahualpa Yupanqui, the Argentine guitarist and folk singer, who was exiled during Perón’s schizophrenic first term. (His pathbreaking ethnomusicological writings remain untranslated into English.) At the moment it was hard to take any pleasure in memories of his papery, earnest baritone; his effortless transitions between rumbling bass strumming and tinkling treble melodies; his Jobim-ish ability to create space and dynamism by joining simple parts in unexpected configurations.

There was still time for one more Cesária, her saturnine and seductive “Petit pays.” But there was no magic the third time. Once the final whistle blew we shuffled into the back room to marinate in our own sodade. The performers graciously welcomed their ungracious audience.