Mumbai boy an overnight celebrity

Mumbai: If you thought that it was weird that FIFA World Cup 2014 started off with a self goal, brace yourself for this, a Mumbai youngster, John Raphael, foresaw it an hour before the game started.

John, with the Twitter handle @RaphaelJohn13, Tweeted an hour before Brazil took on Croatia on Thursday that the first World Cup goal would be a self made one and even named the Brazilian player, Marcelo.

Thanks to the freaky prediction, John is now being called “Nostradamus” and the “octopus for Fifa 2014”.

The 21-year-old economics graduate of St Xavier’s, Mumbai, literally became an overnight celebrity and his “followers” increased by a thousand in less than 12 hours. He even made news in Belgium and trended heavily in Manchester.

“There is nothing to it,” he says. “I have been following football for a long time now and tweeting about it. But I guess there was nothing this big to have caught attention, especially since it was the first match of the World Cup,” says the die-hard Manchester United fan.

In fact, his first prediction was something different, “Initially, I thought Marcelo will score for Brazil, but then I felt that it was going to be for Croatia instead and went online with it,” he says, insisting that he is “no psychic”.

However, if you have your hopes up to follow him and bet your money on his predictions, there might be a problem.

“I don’t plan to predict for all the matches. I guess I am going to follow my gut feeling and tweet if I feel something strongly,” he says, adding, “And I am not supporting any country in particular.”

Since the tweet also carried #bookiesSpecial, he has been vehemently clarifying on Twitter, that it was just a “lucky guess”. “Bhai. Got lucky bro. Not fixed or anything,” read one of his tweets.

Now, several other ‘psychics’ have taken to Twitter using the same hashtag to promote their predictions.