England face France in the World Cup quarter-final on Saturday and the dwindling band of psychic animals has spoken. In the early stages of any World Cup, of course, you cannot move for obliging creatures predicting match results. However, as the tournament progresses, several of this global menagerie will have a shocker, effectively knocking them out of further opportunities to have their random movements anthropomorphised by pushy human keepers/people who reckon there might be two hundred quid in it from a tabloid. As we near the business end of Qatar 2022, though, a psychic alpaca from Chipping Norton is still in it, along with a lion in Thailand. Inauspiciously, both have wandered vaguely in one direction in their enclosure/predicted a France win on Saturday night, which I assume has led to accusations of talking England down, and a slew of credible death threats.
Not that a perfect record insulates any creature from meeting a sticky end themselves. Rabio the octopus was the Japan-based mollusc oracle who accurately forecast every Japan result in the group stages of the 2018 World Cup, yet he was reported by a local news outlet to have been chopped up and eaten before the round of 16. (Which certainly puts the BBC not renewing Mark Lawrenson’s contract into perspective. Though not, perhaps, for Mark.)
