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The Cape Verde Islands will become the smallest country to compete at an Africa Nations Cup finals after qualifying at the expense of Cameroon and their remarkable rise is the culmination of a project to target ‘top talent’.
The Portuguese-speaking country’s elimination of the four-time winners in Sunday’s final qualifying round ranks as one of the biggest shocks in the tournament’s history but it has been on the cards in recent years.
Just 10 years ago the ‘Tubaroes Azul’ (Blue Sharks) beat Mauritania 2-0 at home to record their first win in a competitive international and now they are ranked 51st in the world.
“There was a conscious decision by the federation to embark on a project that would pursue the top talent available and after many years of hard work this has now come to pass,” said Joao de Deus, coach of Portuguese second division club Oliveirense, who was in charge of Cape Verde in 2008 and 2009.
By tapping into a large number of descendants of migrants who have been steadily leaving the island archipelago over the last century, Cape Verde football’s ability far exceeds the country’s 500,000-strong population.
“We now have some 90 percent of our squad members who are playing at clubs in Europe, in Portugal, France, Spain, Holland and other countries,” coach Lucio Antunes said in a recent telephone interview.
“These are professional players who are desperate to show what they can do at the Nations Cup finals. It has been so easy to work with them because of their experience and their desire,” he added.
But while almost all of Cape Verde’s players are drawn from overseas clubs, there remains a fairytale element to the way they have gone from novices to Nations Cup qualifiers in the space of 10 years.
Antunes is on long leave from his job as an air traffic controller and the majority of the squad have no profile outside the Cape Verde. Sunday’s goal hero Heldon, from Maritimo in Portugal, and Ryan Mendes of Ligue 1 Lille are among the exceptions.
Better known Cape Verdians are Manchester United winger Nani and Porto defender Rolando, who both play for Portugal, and former Sweden striker Henrik Larsson, whose father hailed from the island nation.
The Cape Verde, more desert than tropical and situated off the west coast of Africa, won independence in the mid-70s from Portugal but did not play an international until more than a decade later.
They have been FIFA members since only 1986 and did not enter the Nations Cup or World Cup qualifiers until 1992 – two years after Cameroon became the first African country to reach the World Cup quarter-finals.
But on Sunday they looked consummate veterans of the international circuit, toying at times with their Cameroonian hosts as they advanced to January’s finals in South Africa 3-2 on aggregate over two legs.
Global concern is rising over the growing number of hungry persons as nations celebrate World Food day today October 16.
“It is a day designed to raise awareness about all the starving people in the world and create solutions to end world hunger once and for all,” says Yahoo!News.com.
“World Food Day was proclaimed in 1979 by the Conference of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). It marks the date of the founding of FAO in 1945. The aim of the Day is to heighten public awareness of the world food problem and strengthen solidarity in the struggle against hunger, malnutrition and poverty. In 1980, the General Assembly endorsed observance of the Day in consideration of the fact that “food is a requisite for human survival and well-being and a fundamental human necessity,” says the United Nations.
The day is being marked at a time when the UN says one in eight people worldwide still suffers from chronic hunger.
UN organ, the Food and Agricultural Organisation, describes the figure as “unacceptable” and warns that the fight against hunger is slowing down.
“With almost 870 million people chronically undernourished in 2010-2012, the number of hungry people in the world remains unacceptably high,” FAO said in its 2012 report on food insecurity.
The latest figures show that 12.5 percent of the world’s population, or one person in every eight, has yet to be relieved of chronic hunger, it said.
To mark the day, Nigeria’s Minister of Agriculture, Dr. Akinwunmi Adesina, in a statement urged smallholder farmers to strengthen cooperatives to enable them to access funding and markets, the News Agency of Nigeria reports.
He said the Federal Government had recorded 3.9 million farmers on its database and had reached one million farmers directly with seeds and fertilisers.
Noting that this had ended 40 years of corruption in Nigeria’s agricultural sector, adding that farmers would get 10 million cell phones next year.
Five million of the phones will be given to women farmers to facilitate access to agricultural information.
He also dispelled fears that the flood disaster recorded in recent weeks in parts of the country would lead to food scarcity or famine.
Adesina gave the assurance that the Federal Government had mapped out strategies to address the challenge.
