FIFA 2010 World Cup: Parrots give Paul the “Psychic” Octopus competition
While the world pays attention to the predictions of Paul the octopus, Singapore and Pakistan come up with their own football tipsters. These Asian tipsters predicted World Cup semi-final winners correctly and have tipped The Netherlands as the new World Champions.
In Singapore a seven-year-old Parakeet named Mani, who originally hails from Malaysia, has taken the country by storm after correctly predicting that The Netherlands, Uruguay, Germany and Spain would make it into the semi-finals and that Spain would beat Germany.
There was some controversy originally as the local media reported that Mani had tipped South Americans Uruguay to beat the Netherlands. But that was denied by his owner, Munniyappan, who claimed that his pet’s choice was indeed the Europeans who had reached two finals in 1974 and 1978 and lost on both occasions to West Germany and Argentina respectively.
The parrot is placed in Little India, in Singapore, where people from the sub-continent are based. Like the parrot in Karachi, Pakistan, Mani has picked the Netherlands to win the 19th edition of the World Cup.
"Yes, I believe 100 percent whatever he picks will be right," said Munniyappan, who has been a fortune teller all his life and started his trade way back in the historic Singapore district almost 60 years ago.
The procedure for the selection is simple as two cards are placed before Mani’s cage and he picks one that is then over turned by his owner.
In the case of the final a Spanish flag and a Dutch flag were placed before his cage, and the parrot without much hesitation, picked and turned over the card bearing the flag of the men in orange, who have had an unblemished World Cup campaign.
Though Mani has soared to unprecedented popularity in the last week due to his impressive World Cup predictions he has been actively helping answer questions from locals about marriage and fortune for the past seven years.
"He's spot on with some of his predictions in the past, especially when people are buying 4D's (Singapore lottery), I mean, big sweepstakes and all these things," said Puju, who asked Mani to pick lucky numbers for the national lottery coming up at the weekend. "He's a bit of a lucky mascot for that".
On the other hand, a local TV channel in Pakistan DAWN NEWS went to a fortune teller in Karachi, whose parrot, Mithu, correctly chose The Netherlands as the winner of the first semi-final, before picking European champions Spain to prevail over three time champions Germany in the other semi-final match.
Mithu the parrot has already selected The Netherlands as the winners in the title match set to take place on Sunday at the soccer city stadium in Johannesburg.
The green colour parrot has become the talk of the town in Karachi, and is being visited by many tourists from all over the country that throng at the Abdullah Shah Ghazi mausoleum where Mithu is stationed by his owner.
Mithu spent considerable time before selecting The Netherlands as the tournament winner when TV crew went over to film his selection last Tuesday. From the first set of envelopes placed for the first semi-final the parrot picked The Netherlands, who went past Uruguay the same evening. While from the second set of Germany and Spain, the parrot chose the Spaniards who edged out the three time champions by a solitary goal in a pulsating semi-final played in Durban.
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