It appears that Paul, the recently retired ‘psychic’ World Cup octopus, has been awarded a cup of his own. Paul’s owners at the Sea Life Aquarium in Oberhausen, Germany, have given him a trophy filled with mussels as a reward for predicting successfully all of Germany’s results in the 2010 World Cup, and the winner of the final, by picking mussels or oysters out of a jar marked with a competing country’s flag.

Paul’s 100% record in the World Cup has made him a worldwide celebrity. However, he didn’t go down too well with fans of teams that he predicted to lose: his tip that Argentina would lose to Germany caused an Argentinean chef to post an octopus recipe on Facebook, whilst German fans sent Paul death threats when he picked Spain to win their semi-final. (He’s lucky he didn’t have to pick a bad result for South Korea; otherwise, this fate might have befallen him.)

Although he lives in Germany, Paul was actually born in an aquarium in Weymouth. You can tell what a desperate state of affairs the English national team is in when the most successful English appearance during the World Cup came from an eight-armed, aquatic cephalopod (which, despite being an invertebrate, still had more backbone than all of the England team combined).

Paul Bovey

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This entry was posted on Friday, July 16th, 2010 at 2:53 pm and is filed under Sport. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.