I’ll admit to having a decent bias against the Germans, and no, it’s not what you think. It’s part patriotism, and part tall poppy syndrome.
Although I thought Germany had a bloody good chance of winning against the Spanish, I confess to harbouring a fair bit of ill will against them since that fateful Socceroos match.
I was glad to see them defeated.
The Spanish victory came as a surprise to many. But not Paul. If you don’t know who Paul is, then you must have been living under the proverbial rock for the last couple of weeks.
You see, Paul is the resident octopus at Sea Life Aquarium in Oberhausen, Germany. He is better known as the ‘Octopus Oracle’.
He has correctly foreseen the results of each of Germany’s six World Cup matches, including their loss to Serbia, and most recently, last night’s loss to Spain.
In fact, many German television channels interrupted normal programming on Tuesday for a live broadcast from the Aquarium to announce Paul’s semi final selection.
Now one would expect that a team of German sporting professionals would take little or no notice of what an octopus thinks of their chances of victory. Surely their coach, Joachim Loew, would have rallied them by reinforcing the utter flogging they dished out to Argentina.
He would have mentioned the fact that they have scored goal upon goal, while leaving other teams languishing. Ce, he would have felt pretty confident about their chances.
Or maybe, just maybe, the Germans are a heck of a lot more superstitious than we thought!
What other logical reason could there be for last night’s sub par performance?
The conditions were desirable, the refereeing was impartial, there were no major injuries or ridiculous red cards.
Yet it was evident from the very first minutes that Germany were not the same team that had destroyed the hopes of so many other nations. The Spaniards certainly noticed, and they worked it to their advantage.
In fact, it was pure luck that there weren’t several more Spanish goals hitting the back of the German net.
Now imagine, for example, that Australia had an oracle. He might be called Psychic Skippy. The minute Skippy ‘foresaw’ a result against the Aussies, no matter the code, he would be labelled Un-Australian.
And I’m pretty sure that he would be promptly whisked away to the local dog food factory.
Let’s hope that Paul doesn’t end up in a Fish n’ Chip shop in someone’s calamari bucket.
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