Who sent Brazil home? Croatia? Or Cat-roatia?

SHAH ALAM - If you were a football fan who knows the ins and outs of the sports, chances are you would probably say something like Brazil lost because their strikers didn’t strike sharply or Croatia’s defenders did their duty diligence justice; those sorts of stuffs, you name it.

But for others who could care less about what happened on the field between players in each position after a penalty or whatever, surprisingly, they still managed to come up with perhaps a little superstitious, but still undeniably quite fitting to frame the reason behind the five-time World Cup champion’s defeat to its recent opponent in the 2022’s quarter-final.

So, to paint the picture, let’s rewind Brazil’s journey ahead of its last game just a few days earlier.

Bingo, Dec 7, last Wednesday, flashback mode.

Just another day at the World Cup, this time around in Qatar, a press conference was happening which featured Brazil’s forward Vinícius Júnior and that was when a cat hopped in. Okay, so what’s the deal?

Well, as the Brazilian player just laughed at the furry feline, a press officer came into the scene, grabbed the adorable animal by its skin with both his hands and then tossed it off of the table, which it was just harmlessly chilling on like a pillow or a non-living object.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, was Brazilian’s cover of ‘NSync’s Bye Bye Bye to the 2022 Fifa World Cup.

Now, let’s go back to the present before the time-travelling portal is closed.

So, here we are. Croatia’s set for semi-final, Brazil’s sad for home, its manager Tite’s leaving his job.

Welp, not much has changed; Croatia made it to the finals in 2018, Brazil got beaten in quarter-final by Belgium.

How about we take a look at what the world (or the internet at least) has to say about Brazil’s bummer thanks to the ‘cat’s curse’, allegedly, of course.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the animal-rights advocacy group, called what the Brazilian press officer did to the puss-in-no-boots “rude & rough.”

The TrollFootball on Twitter posted a video of the cat-astrophic incident at the conference with the caption, “This cat cursed Brazil.”

Another tweet by lavenderswift93 gave a shout-out to American songstress Taylor Swift quoting, “Taylor Swift was right, Karma is a cat!”

On the ground, a journalist asked the South American team manager about the kitty, “Yesterday, we saw the cat in the press conference interrupting the player, so everybody worries how he feels now. I mean the cat, not the player, and will he be the new talisman of your team?”

In Portuguese, Tite brushed off the question to the press manager.

Perhaps, it was actually karma... or cat-ma.

So Brazil better look for this cast-spelling cat for apology while Croatia might as well consider a token of appreciation for the lucky charm. Correction, lucky cat.

What say you? Do you think Croatia sent Brazil home? Or Cat-roatia did?