This year has brought a lot to Mexico’s Guillermo Franco: played his first match for his national team, moved to Europe and, with Villareal, his club team, he reached the semifinals of the Champions League.

Unfortunately, the miracles stopped for him at that semifinal: the ball just didn’t want to go in. No matter what they did, they felt that the ball wouldn’t go into Arsenal’s goal net.

Franco, who had earlier seen a ‘goal’ disallowed, a golden chance superbly saved and another effort clear the bar by inches, picked up the returning ball, held it to his face as if cupping a human head and screamed his pain. “The ball just wouldn’t go in,” said Franco, braving the world’s press as Juan Roman Riquelme, who had a last-gasp penalty saved, escaped silently behind him.

Franco strongly believes in faith, luck and miracles, since he almost never came to life if it wouldn’t have been for his mother’s premonition.

Franco himself takes up the story of how, two weeks before his mother, Ada Virginia, was due to give birth, a sudden sensation that something was wrong came upon her and she rushed to see a doctor in the town of Corrientes in north-east Argentina.

“There were no symptoms of illness,” said Franco. “My mother said she just had a premonition. She was convinced that her baby was dying and somehow persuaded the doctor to take her to the hospital. There, they discovered that the umbilical cord was wrapped three times around my neck and was strangling me.”

With Cuauhtemoc Blanco, arguably Mexico’s best known current player, controversially left out of the squad, the onus to find the net will fall on the Villarreal forward and Jared Borghetti, the country’s record scorer.

And should Franco’s goals take his adopted country along the path to glory, the player’s traditional raised-arm salute to heaven will become a more familiar sight. “My life has been a miracle. If the time is right for me and Mexico, then God will decide.”

This is quite a story and you should read it all here. For all those that don’t believe in miracles, this might just change all that.