Luis de la Fuente said he wanted a new jumper for his birthday but this was even better. On the day the Spain coach turned 65, his players gifted him the perfect afternoon in Atlanta, the doubts from their opener blown away. Unable to find a way through in 97 minutes here against Cape Verde, this time they had celebrated putting three goals past Saudi Arabia before the first drinks break. Life is there to be enjoyed, Lamine Yamal had said, so they did. By the end it was four and it couldn’t have worked out any nicer.

This was exactly the way the coach would have wished it. Lamine Yamal scoring 10 minutes into his first start since suffering a hamstring injury in April. Mikel Oyarzabal adding two more in the first “quarter”, Marc Cucurella forcing the fourth on 49, victory secured so early that De la Fuente could withdraw those players who needed protecting and give minutes to those that needed them, Mikel Merino and Nico Williams invited to join the party too. Unai Simón was the last to arrive, not making a significant save until the 80th minute.

They can put the matches away, at least for a while. Before this game, Hugo Broos had responded to fierce criticism over South Africa’s start to the World Cup by revealing that eight months ago after qualification a friend had said they would erect a statue of him and the coach had replied by saying: “Make it out of wood; that way it will burn more easily.” Beaten 2-0 by Mexico, they were seven minutes away from following that with a 1-0 loss to Czechia, left with no points, no goals and not much hope. But from almost nowhere, in an arena that Broos criticised as “not a football stadium”, they got the penalty that allows them to fight another day.

Pavel Sulc was the unfortunate man who gave it away, not given time to remove his hand from the path of another long shot. Teboho Mokoena was the man who scored it and what it means could be seen not only in how he celebrated then but in the tears that had rolled during the national anthem before.

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Vozinha, the 40-year-old goalkeeper who was named player of the match after making seven saves in his side’s 0-0 draw against Spain, was in tears at full time. The mother of Cape Verde’s World Cup hero was not there to see history made because she could not afford the visa to the US.

The goalkeeper described the game as the moment he had been working towards his “entire life” and said he wished he could have shared the moment with his late grandparents and his mother.

Wow, just wow. At 1.57pm Atlanta time, 3,291 miles from home, the final whistle went on Cape Verde’s first game in a World Cup finals tournament – and they had only gone and done it.

What they had done was madness: a tiny nation, a debutant, had held one of the favourites, Spain, the European champions, to a 0-0 draw. Bubista, the coach who had led them here, had said he wanted the world to see who and what they are – and, boy, did they see. Qualification, he had insisted, was more than football, it was music, it was culture, it was everything. So what was this? This was wonderful. What a moment and what a noise greeted the moment when the impossible had become real.