Cape Verde qualified for the FIFA 2026 World Cup on Monday, beating Eswatini 3-0 in their last group match to top the standings ahead of Cameroon and complete a fairytale campaign.<\/p>\n
The wind-swept West African archipelago overcame first-half nerves to win in the capital, Praia, with second-half goals from Dailon Livramento, Willy Semedo and veteran Stopira, and book a first-ever appearance at the finals.
\nThey started two points ahead of Cameroon, whose eight previous World Cup final appearances are the most by an African country. Cape Verde finished Group D on 23 points, four ahead of Cameroon, who were held at home to a goalless draw by Angola.<\/p>\n
Cape Verde rarely played international football some 25 years ago, but now heads to next year\u2019s finals in North America as one of the nine African representatives.<\/p>\n
They join Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria and Ghana, which have qualified already.<\/p>\n
Livramento took advantage of Eswatini\u2019s failure to clear to steer home the ball from close range three minutes into the second half, while Semedo also had a tap-in for the second six minutes later.<\/p>\n
Stopira, 37, had only come on as a late substitute as an acknowledgement of his long service with the team since 2008, and put a cherry on the cake with a stoppage-time goal.<\/p>\n
The island\u2019s 600,000 inhabitants had been given the day off to support their team, but there was little to cheer in a tentative first half before Livramento scored. After that, the celebrations could not be contained.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Cape Verde qualified for the FIFA 2026 World Cup on Monday, beating Eswatini 3-0 in their last group match to top the standings ahead of Cameroon and complete a fairytale campaign. The wind-swept West African archipelago overcame first-half nerves to win in the capital, Praia, with second-half goals from Dailon Livramento, Willy Semedo and veteran …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":55761,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sport"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55759"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55759\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55762,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55759\/revisions\/55762"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sudanevents.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}