There have been no shortage of remarkable statistics to come out of Cape Verde’s heroic and historic draw with European Champions Spain on Monday. But perhaps the most extraordinary figure from one of the greatest shocks in World Cup history is, simply, one; the number of fouls that manager Bubista’s underdog side committed throughout a gritty, gutsy and glorious goalless draw. No team had managed to give away so few fouls in a single game since data collection began at this tournament in 1966. And though it may sound a little irrelevant, unimportant in the grand scheme of Cape Verde’s famous night, it points to a level of concentration and a clarity of thought that, somehow, held eleven players together until the end.Run through some of the backstories of Cape Verde’s defensive heroes, and their achievement only swells in meaning. Goalkeeper Vozinha, who turned 40 a fortnight ago, has played club football in Angola, Moldova and Cyprus, and is currently without a team. Centre-back Diney Borges was relegated from the UAE Pro League last month, in front of barely 100 spectators, while his partner in the heart of defence, Pico Lopes, was invited to play for Cape Verde via LinkedIn, a message he originally ignored because he could not understand Portuguese.Though it may be starting to sound like it, this was not the classic underdog tale, the ragtag band of merry men with fortune on their side and a dream. Cape Verde had a plan and executed it flawlessly, making it abundantly clear to the rest of the field that they are here to compete.With their first-ever World Cup point, against the overwhelming group favorites, there has to be belief that they can now push on and reach the knockout stages of a tournament for which they had never previously got close to even qualifying before.Against all the odds, this is how Cape Verde kept out Spain.Unsurprisingly, most of the Cape Verde’s best work came without the ball. Their unerring opponents controlled 74 per cent of possession, and completed 400 passes in the attacking third to Cape Verde’s eleven, an indicator of just how relentlessly Luis de la Fuente’s side circulated the ball close to Vozinha’s goal.But for all Spain’s patience, they could not find a reliable route through Cape Verde’s defensive shape, a 4-5-1 system that focused on compacting space in midfield and relied on its solid foundations — Borges and Lopes — to bear much of the weight from deep.