The Psychic Footballer
I'm surprised it's taken this long, but the psychic animal trope has finally re-emerged as the next big football tournament looms. Cultural tropes of this kind are becoming more common as cultural events become more global. If Germany can have a psychic octopus predicting winners during the 2010 World Cup, Egypt can have a psychic llama prognosticating about the outcome of presidential elections – it's something a casual observer from anywhere else in the world can understand without having to get into the details.
25.05.2012 | aktual.: 25.05.2012 13:41
Now that Paul the octopus is no longer with us (apparently he was delicious), Poland and Ukraine have naturally conducted a search for their own clairvoyant critters. And, huge surprise, they've both found one. I don't know how long this process took, but it must have been a massive undertaking. After all, how do you know your country's psychic animal isn't a pigeon, or an ant crawling up a tree somewhere in the deepest forest.
Poland got lucky and found its four-legged hero in Krakow zoo. I'm assuming they started with the zoos because previous psychic animals have turned out to be immigrants. Paul the octopus lived in a German aquarium, but he was originally from England. A supernatural elephant also turned up in Dallas zoo, where she correctly predicted the outcome of the 2011 Super Bowl.
As far as I know, Citta the elephant's only qualification as a national seer is that she correctly picked Chelsea to win the Champions League – a feat she achieved by choosing an apple next to Chelsea's blue-and-white flag rather than the one next to the logo of their rivals Bayern Munich, which is blue, white and red. Elephants can see in colour, right?
We have been told a lot about Citta's history, but Ukraine's psychic pig remains mysterious. He has been snapped getting into the back of limousines surrounded by big men in ill-fitting suits, but we don't even know his name yet. Could it be that Ukraine is being far more canny in its paranormal pig project than Poland is with its extrasensory elephant?
The problem with elephants is that there aren't very many of them in Poland. By contrast, there are millions of pigs in Ukraine, and nobody can tell the difference between them. If the mystery pig starts getting it wrong, how would we know if he had been 'retired' to the local bacon factory and replaced by a more promising candidate? Poland doesn't have this option, unless there's a secret government warehouse somewhere packed with back-up pachyderms.
The big test will come just before the first matches on June 8. Poland will play Greece in Warsaw and then, the same evening, Russia will play the Czech Republic in Wrocław. What if the pig and the elephant disagree? Will they be allowed a conference call before making their choices? What we really need is a psychic footballer to choose between them – simply put two footballs in front of him, one bearing a picture of a pig and the other of an elephant, and see which one he kicks.
