Who Will Win the World Cup?

Everyone's trying to predict the winner of the ongoing FIFA World Cup. And since I have been asked to voice my opinion on the same, I'll add one to that count.

Most people I know would attempt to undertake such an endeavor based on factors as banal and irrelevant as team form, team success in the recent past, quality of players in the team etc. All this, of course, is quite useless. So we shall have to make our prediction on factors that do play an important role in deciding a team's success.


a. Hairstyles:

A little know fact, but stupid hairstyles are the single most important factor in determining the winner of a major championship. Let's look at some stupid hairstyles from the last World Cup in 2002.

a. Ronaldo wore the most atrocious hairstyle ever seen in a World Cup Final match -- the "half moon on forehead". Brazil, as we all know, won the Cup and Ronaldo finished top scorer.

b. Germany's run to the Final was helped more by Christian Ziege, I opine, than Kahn's brilliance in goal.

c. You were surprised by Turkey's 3rd place finish? I'll explain how that came about. It's simple, really. Umit Davala.

d. USA progressed to the quarterfinals -- an amazing feat for a nation where 89.34% of the population thinks the only form of "football" in the world involves men in tights and wearing helmets and shoulder-pads throwing an oval shaped ball to each other. I give you the reason -- Clint Mathis.

I predict this year too, teams with players sporting the worst hairdos will do the best. Is Ronaldinho's bad enough? I'm not sure.


b. Post Goal Celebrations:

The crazier a team's celebrations after scoring a goal are, the more likely they are to do well in the Cup. I offer Senegal as a brilliant example of the same. No one is likely to forget their post goal antics in 2002, and as we all know, they proved to be one of the big surprise teams of the Championship.

Which team has the stupidest celebrations this time around? I haven't seen enough matches to make the call on this one. But I'm sure those teams are going to do great!


c. The '82 Symmetry Effect:

Football, like the rest of life, has a lot to do with numerology, the supernatural, the occult and other nonsense of this kind. If you look at the list of World Cup winners down the years, you'll see that they form a strange symmetry on either side of the 1982 Cup which Italy won. 1978 and 1986 (+/- 4 years from 1982) were won by Argentina. 1974 and 1990 (+/- 8 years) were both won by Germany. 1970 and 1994 (+/- 12 years) were both won by Brazil as were again the 1960 and 2002 Cups (+/- 20 years).

Of course, the 1966-1998 (+/- 16 years) pair proves to be the exception. However, this is easily explained by the fact that even the omnipotent spirits felt that giving a terrible team like England the Cup twice was too unbelievable for the common man to digest. Hence, in the name of promoting Anglo-French relations, 1998 was decided to be France's.

This of course means that this year's winner will be the team to have won it in 1958 -- Brazil. Well, what with Ronaldinho's hair and this sure sign, I wouldn't bet against them. Would you?

[I swear, if I see one of the Brazilian players doing a little African dance after scoring a goal in the next game I'm calling up Ladbrokes.]