On Sunday night, in a blaze of African glory, World Cup 2010 came to a frustrating, if ultimately just, conclusion. As people who know anything about football across the world held their breath, crossed their fingers and did a load of other superstitious shit in a bid to will Spain to victory, a month of intense competition was reduced to 115 minutes of painful deadlock. Then, Spanish hero Andrés Iniesta, the football hobbit with the receding hairline of a geography teacher and the educated feet of Fred Astaire, lashed the ball past the helpless Dutch keeper to bring the world cup, for the first time, to the Iberian peninsula.
On Monday morning, Spaniards and fans of the “beautiful game” nursed triumphant hangovers and, between trips to the bathroom to be sick, felt a warm smug feeling in the pit of their stomachs. They had witnessed technically superior football win over rugged anti-football tactics. A victory of beauty over the beast, good over evil, BBC over ITV, Lineker over Chiles… but beyond the 0.01% of the population who really care about football, the majority of the world had witnessed the victory of a certain psychic octopus over everything else.
Unless you’ve been avoiding the World Cup like Mel Gibson is avoiding Harlem, you’ll already be familiar with the most famous resident of the Oberhausen Sea Life Centre, Paul the Psychic Octopus – the eight-legged scourge of bookies who managed to correctly predict the outcome of eight World Cup matches in a row, including the final.
Here he is working his magic…
Did I say magic… I meant, using his years of accumulated football expertise, including an in-depth study of the merits of 4-2-3-1 verses the traditional 4-4-2 formation, to deduce the correct outcome.
The odds of Paul getting all 8 predictions correct simply by chance was 1 in 256, which, incidentally, is the same likelihood that Ashley Cole will not vomit during sex. But whether you believe, Paul has a beautiful mind or would make a beautiful lunch, after a frankly middling World Cup that has been dominated by gaffs, cheating, high profile fall outs, star players not performing, erratic balls and those endless motherfucking horns, I’m more than prepared to buy into this clairvoyant ink-spitter.
Paul’s story captured the public imagination in a way that very little of the actual football during this World Cup has, and this poses Fifa with a problem. If the world’s best players, playing for the strongest nations, operating on the biggest stage consistently fail to drum up more public interest than an octopus eating mussels from a plastic box at random, then does this not render the whole World Cup superfluous?
While 22 intellectually-stunted rape enthusiasts kicking a ball around has failed to excite, animals doing stuff they shouldn’t has never failed to delight. Sepp Blatter will proudly talk about the egalitarian spirit of football and how every game, from a kick-about in a local park to the World Cup final, is played to the same rules and with the same equipment. He would reference football’s power to delight, inspire and bring people together. Well that is all well and good Sepp, but have you seen this You:Tube video of two Sea Otters holding hands…?
The effect is exactly the same and I don’t have to listen to Alan Shearer telling me why it’s good.
So what does this mean for Brazil 2014? Well, if I were Fifa I would be making psychic mascots a must for all competing nations (some countries are already striding ahead with this – Singapore already has a psychic parakeet called Mani) and in the event of a draw after 90 minutes the traditional extra time and penalties format would be scrapped in favour of a Pets Win Prizes style animal face-off. We’ve come a long way since wild beasts fought each other in the Roman Colosseum, but those Romans knew how to keep a crowd entertained. If Fifa have any sense at all, they will put dueling animals at the heart of the next World Cup. Otherwise the eyes of the world won’t turn to Brazil in 2014, they will be pointed at computer screens watching YouTube videos of cats playing with cardboard boxes.
