Being named after a Russian politician set a course of unorthodoxy for Yeltsin Tejada’s life, so there is no sense of surprise for him in the way the Costa Rica midfielder and his teammates topped a group including England, Italy and Uruguay.
A surprise did come, though, when he learnt who were to be their next opponents.
“We were thinking more about Colombia and the Ivory Coast and in the end came the least expected team,” he said. “Now we have to change the video cassette.”
Even Costa Rica, despite being outsiders themselves, did not believe in Greece.
There were no reasons to. The Greeks had played eight World Cup games and failed to score in seven of them. They looked one of the World Cup’s worst teams and they were up against Ivory Coast’s golden generation.
They won, however, and in such uncharacteristically attacking fashion that they earned a few new admirers in the process.
Georgios Samaras had no qualms about the awarding of a late penalty, despite its controversial nature, as he converted it superbly. Greece had hit the woodwork three times, so it was hard to dispute that they were deserving winners.
So was set up the least likely last-16 tie in this World Cup – the battle of the deserving overachievers.
The Greeks’ victory against Ivory Coast was transformative; defensive dullards were reinvented as intrepid underdogs, while Costa Rica swept all before them in a manner unimaginable before the tournament. Whoever succeeds, a quarter-final place will go to minnows.
Greece rather relish their status. Veteran captain Giorgos Karagounis’s verdict on the Ivory Coast game was significant.
“We prevailed against the odds,” he said after the match. “We had passion and we had fight.”
They are qualities the 37 year old has displayed in abundance into his international career, which has entered overtime. The Ivory Coast game was his 138th cap and would have been his last if Greece had not won.
Karagounis, suspended for the Euro 2004 final and the Euro 2012 quarter-final, is now eligible for a major game, which is something of a rarity for him.
His contemporary, Kostas Katsouranis, is reprieved. The 35 year old's time with the national team would have ended with his sending-off against Japan had his teammates not qualified, but he is available again after a ban.
Those two are the only survivors of the heady days when Greece conquered Europe to win their one major honour.
Greece were spirited in 2004, but the legacy came in the form of negativity, which dominated their tactics for much of the subsequent decade.
It was understandable – why change an approach that had propelled them to glory especially as, to use Karagounis’s words, “it was against the odds”? But it had been scarcely rewarding.
Greece failed to qualify for the 2006 World Cup, were abysmal in Euro 2008 and the 2010 World Cup and somehow reached the last eight of Euro 2012, only to be thrashed by Germany.
When this tournament began with a comprehensive defeat to Colombia and then the desperate stalemate with Japan, it looked like the continuation of a theme.
Then, suddenly, they became history makers.
“We came here to advance from the group stage,” Karagounis said. “We’ve never done it before, and we did in a great way.”
Their strengths were outlined simply by the scorer Samaras. “We are a team,” he said. “A team – that’s it.”
They rely on the collective to compensate for individual deficiencies. They have never had a world-class striker, attacking midfielder or winger. Deprived of creativity, they rely on industry.
They only scored 12 goals in a 10-game qualifying group, an indication of their lack of potency. Yet together they defeated the more gifted, but disjointed, Ivorians.
As Costa Rica, their Central American equivalents, can testify, teamwork can take a side a long way.
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