They jumped, shouted and raised fists in the air, celebrating a historic goal amid an unexpected soccer marriage that only the World Cup could produce.
“CA-bo VER-de!” someone chanted, and everyone joined in to repeat the call. “CA-bo VER-de!”
It was early on Sunday evening, and Honey Fitz, an Irish joint in Astoria, Queens, was rollicking as World Cup fans watched a match on several TVs — Cape Verde fans in blue, Ireland fans in green, all together cheering an improbable outcome.
“Pico made this connection happen!” Casamiro Cabral, a Cape Verde fan living in New York, shouted above the din.
Pico is Roberto Lopes, a stout defender for Cape Verde, the plucky squad from the small island nation off the coast of West Africa that has captured the world’s imagination after two almost unthinkable results at the World Cup.
Mr. Lopes was born in Ireland, but plays internationally for Cape Verde, where his father is from. With his distinctive Dublin accent and Cape Verdean passport, he is the reason for all the fun at Honey Fitz.
The World Cup is not nearly as fun when your team fails to qualify, but it happened to fans of the Republic of Ireland, and that left Mr. Lopes, 34, as the only player born in Ireland in the 48-team tournament. Through that transitive quality of fandom, fans from the Emerald Isle adopted Cape Verde as their own. After all, in Portuguese, the official language of Cape Verde, “verde” is green.
Sean Doran went a step further. Originally from Dublin, Mr. Doran is an owner of Honey Fitz and he has a connection to Shamrock Rovers, Mr. Lopes’s Irish club team. Before the World Cup started and Cape Verde became one of the darlings of the tournament, Mr. Doran declared Honey Fitz “the official New York bar of Cape Verde.” Even Mr. Lopes took notice.
“I think it’s amazing,” Mr. Lopes said in a telephone interview on Tuesday from Cape Verde’s team hotel near its training site in Tampa, Fla. “I never thought it would blow up like it has, but it really did.”
Mr. Doran has a cousin who was sporting director of Rovers in Dublin, and his brother, Andy Doran, is the current assistant athletic trainer for the team. Mr. Doran posted his bar’s self-proclaimed status as New York’s Cape Verdean headquarters on Instagram, and Mr. Lopes sealed his approval with a repost.
From there it mushroomed. Ireland fans had a World Cup team to cheer, and Cape Verde fans in New York had a place to do it.
Many soccer fans expected Cape Verde to be overwhelmed at its first World Cup. But with Mr. Lopes anchoring the defense, the Blue Sharks achieved a stunning 0-0 draw against Spain in their first match. It was considered a victory of sorts because Spain, winner of the 2010 World Cup, is a contender to win the championship this year.
At the bar that first match, Mr. Doran said, dozens of Cape Verdean supporters, most of them the children of Cape Verdean immigrants, showed up dressed in blue and white. Some had driven from Rhode Island and Massachusetts, the two traditional centers of Cape Verdean immigration to the United States (New York’s Cape Verdean community is estimated to be much smaller).
By Sunday’s match against Uruguay, word had spread and Honey Fitz was packed. Joining the Cape Verde supporters were many Irish fans, too, and they all rooted together. It was as if Mr. Lopes’s cousins from his mom’s side met with cousins from his dad’s side to throw a bash in Astoria.
Even one of Mr. Lopes’s teammates at Rovers, Rory Gaffney, was at Honey Fitz for the Uruguay match. He joined a group of his friends from County Galway, the highlight of a weekend trip to New York. They gathered at the center of the bar and cheered along when the seemingly impossible journey continued: Cape Verde scored.
“Let’s go, Cabo!” The entire bar erupted with the chant, using a mix of English and Portuguese, as bartenders scurried to keep up with demand for celebratory drinks.
Mr. Lopes said he heard details of Sunday’s festivities at Honey Fitz from Mr. Gaffney, who messaged him to rave about the atmosphere.
“I’ll always root for Pico,” Mr. Gaffney said at the bar on Sunday. “Great lad, great captain. In my 15 years of playing, I’ve never had a better captain than Pico. He deserves all of this.”
Mr. Lopes’s story is one of the most circuitous at the World Cup. In 2018 he was a part-time soccer player, holding down what he described as “a good job,” as a mortgage adviser. That helps explain why he dismissed a LinkedIn message, which was written in Portuguese, from the coach of Cape Verde at the time. He didn’t know the language.
Mr. Lopes was not considered good enough to play for Ireland, but the Cape Verde option lingered in the ether. His mother is Irish and his father is from Cape Verde, and the Blue Sharks really wanted him. About a year later, the coach tried again. That time Mr. Lopes used a translation app and jumped at the opportunity. He secured a Cape Verdean passport and has played in 40 games for the Sharks since 2019, traveling extensively throughout Africa with the team, especially for home games in Cape Verde, where his grandfather still lives.
“I visited as a little boy, but it’s been an amazing experience to connect with my Cabo Verdean side as an adult through football,” he said. Mr. Lopes said he has heard about watch parties near his family home in Dublin, where pubs are filled with people cheering on his adopted team.
At Honey Fitz on Sunday, fans were hopeful, but guarded. It’s one thing to get a lucky draw against an overconfident team. But to follow it up against an Uruguay side that was now alert to Cape Verde’s grit would be a steep challenge. This time, even more fans squeezed in to the pub.
“It’s what the World Cup is all about,” said Aisha Smith, a New Jersey resident of Cape Verdean descent. “It’s beautiful.”
Ms. Smith, originally from Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, is a postpartum doula. She made the two-hour journey to Honey Fitz on Sunday “to be with my people,” she said. And when the Blue Sharks scored in the second half against Uruguay to draw even, 2-2, she joined the raucous cheering, with beer spilling as fans rushed to embrace one another.
Among the cheering celebrants was Paul Andersen, a lawyer originally from Ireland, who now lives in New York. “We have all this pent-up energy as Ireland fans,” he said. “It had to go somewhere, and Cabo Verde is a great channel for that positive energy.”
He wore a white Cape Verde jersey, which he had custom-made, with “Lopes” and No. 4 written on the back. His partner, Michelle Lanchart, whom he met playing soccer in Chinatown, wore the blue version.
Standing nearby was Armani Correia, an I.T. executive of Cape Verdean descent, originally from Massachusetts, now living in New York. He celebrated with Gareth Sweeney, a crisis manager for the United Nations, originally from Kilkenny, Ireland, who wore the bright green Ireland shirt that his father wore to the World Cup in New Jersey in 1994.
Mr. Correia, like several of the Cape Verde supporters, wore a Boston Red Sox baseball hat. Cape Verdeans have made the journey from their island nation to Massachusetts and Rhode Island for generations, part of their legacy as skilled sailors who flourished in the whaling and fishing trades. Many settled in places like New Bedford, Providence and now the Dorchester section of Boston.
“We have a deep connection with the Irish in Boston,” Mr. Correia said. “It makes sense we are all cheering for the same team.”
Their next chance to do it comes on Friday when Cape Verde plays Saudi Arabia for a chance to advance to the knockout stage, with Mr. Lopes at the center of it all.
“I’m very lucky,” he said. “I feel like I’m representing two countries at the World Cup.”
The post Why Everyone in This Irish Pub Is Rooting for Cape Verde’s Soccer Team appeared first on New York Times.
