Shamrock Rovers defender Roberto Lopes is among the players that will be showcasing their skills at the Nations cup which kicks off January in Cameroon. Lopes would not have been become Cape Verde international but for last minute cross check of LinkedIn message send to him over nine months ago by for Cape Verde coach Rui Aguas.
While scanning his LinkedIn account in 2019, Shamrock Rovers defender Roberto Lopes came across a peculiar invitation in a foreign language.
It was the then manager of the Cape Verde national football team, Rui Aguas. But after making contact with him, the Dublin-born centre-back ignored his follow-up message. It almost cost Lopes unknown to him a chance at international football.
‘Out of sheer ignorance and probably rudeness, I didn’t translate the message! I just assumed it was spam and was a standard LinkedIn greeting in Portuguese, which I don’t speak,” Lopes recalls. sports post, on the eve of playing in the 2021 Africa Cup of Nations.
Nine months later, however, after a follow-up text in English from Aguas, the Shamrock Rovers star realized to his surprise that he was not being led up the garden path. Yes, the Cape Verde Football Association really wanted him to announce himself to the small island country in the Atlantic through his Cape Verdean father.
He only set up his LinkedIn page at university eight years earlier, while studying Leisure Management at the Dublin Institute of Technology. How useful that turned out to be.
“I went back and copied and pasted the original message into Google Translate and he asked me, ‘We’re trying to get new players, do you want to sign up for Cape Verde?’
‘I was absolutely delighted as I never thought it was a real opportunity and it just happened to me I’m so glad I wrote it back in time!
“I was very excited to play international football, but the nerves were due to the language. My mother is Irish and my father speaks Creole, but I never learned it.
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“But once I landed and met the rest of my teammates, they were fantastic with me. Everyone spoke English, they all gave their best with me and helped me learn bits and pieces of Creole to help me when I’m on the field. It was great, my first trip was great.’
Ninety minutes and a 2-1 win later, Lopes was an international footballer. Now, after a total of eight caps in two years, the 29-year-old is gearing up to compete against some of the biggest football stars in the world at AFCON.
The Cape Verde squad is now safe in Cameroon and ready to take on Ethiopia in January 9 opener and Lopes is happy to be in the squad filing out to compete on behalf of Cape Verde’s 483,000 inhabitants.
