Animal instinct and maths boost Netherlands’ hopes of World Cup glory

When Paul the Octopus sadly died at an aquarium in Germany in 2010, there was a massive void to fill in the World Cup prediction space. It seemed a huge ask to find a tipster on the same level as the eight-legged maverick one-off. Others tried but Leon the Porcupine, Anton the Tamarin and Petty the Pygmy Hippopotamus were all woefully wide of the mark; this was no golden generation of animal oracles. Things turned dark in 2018 when a new octopus, Rabio, appeared on the scene but was killed by a Japanese fisher despite the sea-dwelling savant getting it right with all three of the Samurai Blue’s group games. Big Website still has a lot of players ‘writing themselves into the history books’. Surely given the state of books (and history) we need to come up with a new term like ‘entered themselves at the datacentre’ or ‘input themselves into a field on a spreadsheet on the Opta supercomputer’?” – Michael Hill. Given that the (somewhat logical) German words for semi-final, etc are worthy of a letter o’ the day ( yesterday’s Football Daily letters ), here by contrast are the somewhat odd Finnish terms. A final is an ‘end match’ ( loppuottelu ) but recently the boring ‘final’ ( finaali ) is often used. A semi-final is a välierä , where erä is round and väli is intermediate. So a rather vague ‘intermediate round’. So far so good, perhaps, but a quarter-final is a puolivälierä = a half välierä or in other words a ‘half intermediate round’. The round of 16 is then a ‘a quarter intermediate round’, a neljännesvälierä ” – Mike Walsh. Continue reading...