There's a cat on the pitch. Does he think it's all over? It is meow! It says much for the insipid nature of the football at Anfield on Monday night that one of the highlights of the evening was the feline pitch invasion that briefly delayed the game after 12 minutes.
The intrepid tabby is far from the first animal interloper to have stopped a game in full flow. An Old Firm game in November 1996 was halted by a fox in the box, who made quick his or her escape. "We were very impressed with the pace of the fox," said the Celtic public relations manager Peter McLean. "It still hasn't been caught. We don't know how it got in and how it escaped. We have even been given the brush-off by its agent."
Real Madrid's game against Real Betis at the Bernabéu in 1996-97 was delayed by a rabbit presumably thrown into the fray from the terraces. Real's Carlos Secretario was quick enough to catch it. "Secretario may or may be not a good player," said the TV commentator Arsénio Iglesias at the time, "but he is indeed a great hunter."
But the animal kingdom and football are not always comfortable bed fellows. In November 1970 the Brentford goalkeeper Chic Brodie had his career ended after a dog on the pitch ran into him, shattering his kneecap. "The dog might have been a small one, but it just happened to be a solid one," Brodie later reflected.
And as Torquay United, trailing 2-1 to Crewe, stared down the barrel of relegation on the final day of the 1986-87 season a police dog named Bryn, who had been patrolling the touchline with his handler, bit Torquay's Jim McNichol on the upper thigh. It took four minutes for play to restart after the injury and in the fourth minute of stoppage time United scored the goal that kept them in the Football League.
Football is not the only sport occasionally at the mercy of the animal kingdom – baseball, gaelic football, rugby league and even golf have had trouble with furry and feathered friends.
These and many more stories are recounted in our Knowledge archive – here and here – and in this recent Joy of Six.