By Sheriff Bojang Jnr.
At 6pm Sunday, 24-year-old Bachir Diallo hopelessly stood in front of his popular game shop in the Senegalese capital, Dakar, where just about ten football fans turned up to watch the world cup final clash between Spain and the Netherlands.
At the beginning of the world cup in June, at least 50 fans paid money on a daily basis to watch games on one of the three 55-inch screens in the shop. Watching the games at the overcrowded shop give fans an opportunity to shout and yell at each other and according to Bachir, "sometimes exchange blows out of love for their teams. Everybody loves it."
But more and more fans stayed away from watching games at the shop since the German-based octopus Paul started predicting the results successfully.
“A world cup final is the biggest football match in the world and it is every football fan’s dream to watch it. I was expecting my business to boom come this final but look at the shop… only a handful of people. Everybody’s telling me that they wouldn’t pay to watch a game which is already predicted by that so-called seer Octopus”, says Bachir.
About 100 meters away from Bachir’s shop is a sandy and dirty empty land where dozens of boys were busy playing football while the Spain-Netherlands game was about to start.
Serigne, one of the lads playing football there said "everybody said that octopus never predicted wrong. And now it predicted Spain would win. So why should we bother watching the game when we already know the winner? There’s no point. That’s why we decided to play our own game here. We’ll watch the Spanish victory celebration later”.
Many households in Dakar watched a Latin American soap opera on TV instead of the world cup final.
While the Spanish team was lifting the trophy, thousands of Senegalese football fans were at various beaches enjoying music with their loved ones.
And for Bachir Diallo, “congratulations to the octopus, but it has spoiled my business and it has spoiled the world cup for thousands of fans. Now that the world cup is over, someone should just fry this sea food with pasta or something and eat it once and for all”.
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