Paul Watson

So that him and Ben Wayne from Port Vale, he scored as well against Chile.

There is more strength in depth than it looks with just relying on Chris Wood.

But then, I mean, my favourite player actually is Eli Just from Motherwell.

He's brilliant and he's almost always there for New Zealand.

And he's just such a lovely, like, creative figure in the team.

Sarpreet Singh's been great, but he's had injury problems.

But...

I think the thing everyone's talking about is surely Tim Payne, right?

I mean, now the most famous man in the world suddenly, having previously been, well, having previously been labelled the least known player in the World Cup, right?

But this is a squad that also has Tommy Smith from Braintree Town.

So I suspect Tommy Smith's sitting there at home thinking, that could have been me.

Well, yeah, I mean, it's been sold as a sort of surprise story, which in a way it is.

They're the third smallest nation by population to reach a World Cup.

They topped a group with Cameroon and Angola in it, which, you know, you wouldn't necessarily expect it.

But they've been building this team since about 2023 AFCON, really, where they topped a group with Egypt and Ghana and sort of shocked everyone there.

And it's a really strong unit.

None of them are domestically based players.

They're all coming from Europe, including Roberto Pico Lopez coming from Ireland, who was recruited by LinkedIn, which is one of my favourite stories of the World Cup.

He got a LinkedIn message saying, do you want to come and play for Cape Verde?

But it was in Portuguese, so he just ignored it.