It was a sure thing. Unanimous. England would beat France and reach their second successive World Cup semi-final. The meerkats at a Sussex zoo declared it, via the medium of clambering into an England flag-decorated bucket of whatever it is meerkats eat. Not a single meerkat put his faith in Olivier Giroud, there was no meerkat foresight when it came to Aurélien Tchouaméni firing a low, long-distance shot into the corner of Jordan Pickford’s goal.
We should have known. World Cup psychic animals have burnt us before, their competence often hovering somewhere around the level of Derek Acorah. As my colleague Marina Hyde notes, this shouldn’t be surprising, given that, y’know, they are animals. And yet, those meerkats did previously predict the Lionesses’ European Championship triumph and when Paul the Octopus repeatedly called results correctly during the 2010 World Cup the world watched. Octopuses are, after all, a very intelligent species.
