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As the England Colombia match approached injury time I tweeted "This is in the bag. I say we start preparing for the quarter final with Sweden now.â€
Of course I did this as a funny joke, both about daring to test fate and also that I knew it would scare loads of people who believe a man sitting in Hertfordshire can affect something happening in Russia merely by his own over-confidence. If I was able to alter world events in this way I might use the power for something more important. But I love the illogicality of humans that they will blame someone saying, for example, that they think someone will do something well, if they then do it badly.
I was also aware that England might fuck things up in the last few minutes, so there was an element of sarcasm to that over-confidence. But overall I thought we’d done enough and that we were going to win and that it’d be good to shit people up by poking at their superstition.
A few people told me I had jinxed the game, so I replied to one "There is no way on earth that Colombia will equaliseâ€.
Of course then Colombia nearly scored and people were cross with me. I nearly tweeted “They will score from the corner†(and apparently if it’s about the opposition then the curse works the other way round and you are proven right), but I didn’t. But they scored anyway.
Everyone blamed me.
I was aroused by the fact that everyone finds me so powerful, that my mere thoughts can make the opposite of what I expect to happen happen. I mean as super powers go that is quite a weak one. Especially if you can’t trick it by just saying the opposite of what you actually want, so what you want happens. But it’s still better than no power to influence football matches from afar.
Had England thrown it away again as usual? I am not going to reveal the score in case anyone is waiting for the box set. But let’s just say, no, they didn’t throw it away. They won on penalties (as I had actually predicted before the match kicked off- though got the score slightly wrong). I don’t think I have given too much away.
But the turmoil that the team and the nation had been through had brought us closer together and created bonds and magic that would not have been there had we won it in regular time.
It had all been part of my plan.
Influence the result via tweeting, so that the team would come out stronger and have a better chance of winning the whole thing.
Did any of the people who blamed me for the equaliser get in touch to thank me for giving them all the excitement and motivating the team to win the World Cup? No they did not. The superstitious are hypocrites in many ways.
The penalties made my heart beat so loudly that I could hear it without putting a hand to my chest. If I was this nervous, how the Hell were the players feeling? Hopefully they hadn't drunk a big bottle of beer and a triple whisky, though.
