“Where has he been?” Gary Neville said of Vozinha, the Cape Verde goalkeeper. “We should have met him before.” Should you have, really? Met him before? Surely that would have defeated the point. The appeal of the underdog, after all, is that a month ago you wouldn’t have been able to name them. They’re supposed to come out of absolutely nowhere and they have: what with Arthur Fery, Maja Chwalinska, and Cape Verde, we’ve been spoilt for choice these past two months.
Fery’s Wimbledon semi-final loss to Alexander Zverev brought a great underdog story to an end. The four teams left in the World Cup are also the four highest-ranked teams in the world. But the long shots will linger for a while. Ranked 114th, Fery is the lowest-rated player to make it into a grand slam semi-final since … well, since Chwalinska the Polish qualifier, also ranked 114th, made a similarly astonishing run at the French Open. Chwalinska took it a step further: she beat Diana Shnaider to secure a spot in the final, becoming only the second ever qualifier in the open era, man or woman, to do so.
Funnily enough, the first-ever player ranked outside the top 100 to advance to a major semi-final, Patrick McEnroe at the 1991 Australian Open, was also ranked 114th in the world; like Fery, he played college tennis for Stanford. Should we have seen this coming?
Before last year Fery had never qualified for an ATP 1000 tournament, let alone won a grand slam match. Chwalinska began the French Open wearing unadorned, mismatched outfits until the brokerage firm XTB stepped in to sponsor her midway through. Cape Verde were ranked 69th in the world and found themselves in the last 32.
These stories enthral precisely because they’re so unexpected. Athletes, the American writer David Foster Wallace once wrote, make “a certain type of genius as carnally discernible as it ever can get”. He was speaking of the best ones, of how watching the greats play reveals the vast chasm between us and them, but there’s a permissibility about the underdog that compels us. We want to know how it feels – on the pitch, behind the baseline – and an underdog is the closest They will ever get to Us. The Dublin-born defender Pico Lopes thought the LinkedIn recruitment message from the Cape Verde football association was spam and summarily ignored it.
When Iga Swiatek, Chwalinska’s childhood friend and former doubles partner, became one of tennis’s biggest stars, the latter’s struggles with self-esteem only worsened. “I was incredibly proud of Iga,” she said. “But I felt even worse about myself then, because we were the same age and she was winning tournaments. Where was I?”
Which is probably a sentiment that watching Fery, a nosebleeding, Godfather-watching, stocky cross-channel Briton with an expression of vaguely perpetual boyishness, evokes. At the net the 6ft 6in Zverev patted him on the chest and Fery looked – well, was – a whole head shorter. After winning her quarter-final, Chwalinska asked the crowd to pray that the fees for an extended hotel stay remained reasonable, having not expected to remain in Paris this long: “I’ve earned quite a bit [by making it this far], but the money doesn’t come immediately.”
We are captivated by the moments in which the underdogs outdo themselves, in which they bring the fight despite being, on paper, completely outclassed. You could chalk Cape Verde’s opening draw with Spain down to opponents misfiring, but against Argentina they were undeniably magnificent, Sidny Lopes Cabral’s shot screaming into the top corner, Vozinha turning in the kind of performance every 40-year-old father dreams of if asked to stand in goal against Lionel Messi. We love them the most then, in those moments of disbelieving magic.
So often they’re buoyed up by the strength of their own narrative. Now and then, though, the illusion flickers and we see them as they are. On Philippe-Chatrier, Chwalinska was 3-2 up against the teenage phenomenon Mirra Andreeva before the Russian won nine games in a row to steamroll her in straight sets. Against Zverev, Fery leapt for a lob and missed completely, then he saved three break points while down 4-2 in the third set and during the changeover Henman Hill was perhaps the most optimistic place in the world.
The gap, of course, is generally unassailable – but the appeal is that, for a few brief, blissful moments or days, you can pretend it isn’t. A wildcard entry might beat the No 2 in the world. An island nation with a population of 530,000 and a defender recruited off LinkedIn might just beat the greatest player of all time. And if they could do that, what might you be capable of?
It’s often said of underdogs such as these that they have lost, but also won – an infuriating sentiment. They’ve lost. That’s the truth of it: they lost the game, the set, the knockout match. But for a while, watching from your sofa or Miami or SW19, all the possibility in the world gets distilled into that single glorious run. The Cape Verde team celebrated their 103rd-minute equaliser wildly as Messi stared into the distance. An hour later they queued up in the mixed zone asking him for a selfie and a shirt. They’re most discernible in those moments, too.
Leave a Reply