The Shamrock Rovers and Cape Verde defender on singing in Creole and how he ended up driving with one leg out of the window
At the age of 24 Roberto “Pico” Lopes was a part-time centre-back with a steady day job in a bank in his native Dublin. He was freshly qualified as a mortgage adviser. A solid career was taking shape before him. He hated it.
Three years later he is a professional footballer who hopes to lift his first major trophy on Sunday before embarking this month on the Africa Cup of Nations qualification campaign with Cape Verde Islands, from where his father comes and for whom he made his debut in October. “It’s crazy, so surreal,” he says before explaining how excited he is about the new direction his career has taken and the cultural awakening it has inspired – and how close he came to missing out on all that because of an embarrassing social media mix-up and a twisted testicle. Those last two things, it should be made clear right now, were not related.