Fifa World Cup Qatar 2022: Japanese football fans bask in Samurai Blue’s 2-1 upset win over Germany
- Taiyo, a male otter in a Tokyo aquarium, is being effusively praised for predicting the shock victory against the four-times champion
- Before the game the mammal placed a miniature football into a bucket bearing the Japanese flag, ignoring German and ‘draw’ buckets
With the Samurai Blue a goal down at half-time in the Khalifa International Stadium in Doha on Wednesday and the Japanese goalkeeper performing heroics to keep the German attack at bay, Issei Izawa made a terrible mistake. He went to bed.
“It really didn’t look good at that point, and I had to get up really early for work this morning, so I turned it off at half-time,” he said. “Honestly, I thought Japan would be lucky to get away with a 3-0 loss, the way Germany were playing.”
The scale of his error of judgment only became apparent when he checked his mobile phone through bleary eyes when the alarm went off.
“I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “I never thought Japan could possibly beat a team like Germany, who have won the World Cup like four times before. How could that happen?”
Japanese fans across the country were asking themselves the same question as the final whistle blew in Qatar just before midnight in Japan, but that was swiftly replaced by jubilation at the 2-1 result.
Drinkers in bars that screened the game live erupted as the referee signalled the end of the match, with TV footage capturing revellers in the team’s blue shirts and waving the national flag clogging the streets of Tokyo’s Shibuya nightlife district. There were similar scenes of relieved and ecstatic fans dancing in the streets of Osaka, Yokohama and Nagoya.
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Japanese fans celebrate their team’s stunning World Cup upset victory over Germany