Shortly before the beginning of the World Cup former wife of John Lennon and renowned football pundit Yoko Ono unashamedly put forward her opinion as to who the eventual winner would be.
Who will win the World Cup?
A child who believes in a peaceful world.— Yoko Ono (@yokoono) February 14, 2017
Even though I had “A child who believes in a peaceful world” in our football pool, I was delighted to see tears on his little optimistic face as he was knocked out on penalties in the second round. I am not sure what Yoko Ono was thinking trying to predict football, she is clearly no octopus.
In 2010 an octopus named Paul correctly predicted all of Germany’s results and that Spain would win the tournament. He died of natural causes with a prediction record stained by only a few bad decisions. This time a giant Pacific octopus in Japan named Rabio accurately predicted all three of Japan’s group stage matches, before being chopped up and eaten prior to Japan’s second-round clash. It’s a sad reflection of the times that we don’t even have enough respect for a magical octopus to wait until after the tournament to eat him.
Apart from showing that had Pikachu actually been discovered in Japan Ash Ketchum would probably have been unimpressed and, eaten him with lashes of soy sauce, this story of the Japanese Octopus is also something of a conundrum. For one thing, because he was an octopus, and therefore incapable of human speech, we will never know if he could predict his own grisly demise.
Was he a hapless, unknowing victim of his captor’s meat-cleaver? Or, was he, as I like to think, fully aware of what was to happen to him the whole time? Perhaps he knew that like Paul, psychic abilities only last so long, wrong answers were around the corner, and, true to his Japanese culture, unable to face the shame of his own inevitable failures, he orchestrated his own demise by peeing on his captor’s rug? It is a noble end, and, now that she too has been proven wrong, one another Japanese football pundit, Yoko Ono should consider. You broke up the Beatles Yoko! It’s time to go.