It’s early evening on Sunday 1 September on the south coast of England and 35-year-old delivery driver Tom Kane is at a local park with his young family refreshing his phone. He could be forgiven for being a bit distracted by the swings and roundabouts.
If the score between Manchester United and Liverpool stays as it is (3-0 to Liverpool) Tom will win one million pounds. With just over half an hour left of the match his six score predictions, made via the Sky Sports Super 6 app the previous day, are exactly right:
Leicester City 1-2 Aston Villa
Everton 2-3 AFC Bournemouth
Nottingham Forrest 1-1 Wolverhampton Wanderers
West Ham United 1-3 Manchester City
Newcastle United 2-1 Tottenham Hotspur
Manchester United 0-3 Liverpool
VIDEO: How Liverpool just destroyed Man United
“I couldn’t watch it,” explains Tom speaking exclusively to FourFourTwo about the game that changed his life. Having watched his four score predictions come in on Saturday, he’d sat down the following day with his wife to watch Newcastle vs Tottenham at 1.30pm knowing he was two correct scores away from the seven-figure prize. “Obviously she was really up for watching the football on Sunday afternoon!”
When that game ended 2-1 to Newcastle, as Tom had predicted, and the screaming and shouting had subsided, it started to dawn on Tom that he could be on the verge of a life-changing amount of cash landing in his current account. The Manchester United vs Liverpool game was an hour away from kicking off but Tom suggested the family leave the house.
“I was like ‘let’s just go out. I’ll keep an eye on the score on my phone, I can’t watch it. I don’t want to watch it – it’s going to be too stressful'. That Newcastle game was stressful enough, so we went to the park and took the kids out. But I was just looking at my phone constantly.
“I saw Liverpool, went one nil up through Trent Alexander Arnold and it got disallowed. So I was like: ‘Oh, God’ and then Liverpool got two quick goals before halftime. Me and my wife just looked at each other. We couldn't believe it.”
Mo Salah made it 3-0 to match Tom’s prediction in the 56th minute but he went cold, fearing his score had matched too early with 34 minutes left, plus injury time. By this point, there were only two players who could possibly win the million-pound jackpot, with one player having predicted Manchester United 1-3 Liverpool. (Spare a thought for them!)
At the start of the day, 75 players had correctly picked four correct scores, and by full-time of Newcastle vs Tottenham, eleven players were still in the running for the prize.
Normally, the prize fund for a clean sweep of six correct scores is £250,000, but it had been so long since anyone had correctly predicted six perfectly, Super 6 had rounded the stakes up to one million pounds.
“For the last 10 minutes of the match, we walked back to the car and listened to the game on the radio. The atmosphere at Old Trafford sounded dead. I thought the way the commentators were talking, it didn't sound like a lot was happening. At this point, I was like: ‘This could actually come in’. But I could not think beyond that full-time whistle. I couldn't think: 'I'm gonna spend the money on this. I'm gonna do this', I was just solely focused on full-time.
“When the full-time whistle went, me and my wife just burst out laughing and crying. We could not believe it. We were shouting. We were screaming. There were people in the car next to us looking at us like ‘What the hell is going on’.”
The drama wasn’t over, Tom’s phone battery had died from all the refreshing and he had quite an important call to field. With Super 6’s social media channel posting: “Are you Tom from Southampton - and have you just nailed six correct scores?! Keep your mobile phone handy - you're about to receive the phone call of a lifetime”.
“I was like, ‘What if they call and my phone's dead? We need to get home now!’ So I drove home – obviously sticking to the speed limit – chucked my phone on charge and then I was waiting about an hour for the phone call. They went through the security questions with me. Then finally said: ‘Congratulations. You’ve just won a million pounds. How do you feel?’
“The adrenaline rush lasted about a week. If I'm honest, me and my wife couldn't sleep properly all week. It wasn't just winning the money. It was the attention it was getting on social media. It was our friends and family finding out – how do you break the news to someone that you don't see every day? You don't just go ‘Oh, I'm just phoning you up to say we got a million pounds now’ it just sounds a bit arrogant”.
In the week that followed, Super 6 invited Tom and his wife to the filming of Gary Neville’s Stick to Football podcast, and the presenters were recorded talking about Tom’s win in the show’s preamble. “I spoke to them all privately. They were all really nice. It was just great to meet so many legends. All five of them (Gary Neville, Paul Scholes, Roy Keane, Ian Wright, Jamie Carragher) are players that I watched as a kid. Roy Keane pulled me to the side, shook my hand, and said, in his Irish accent: “Fair play, son. Fair play”.
Tom plans to use the money to buy a house for his family, and cars for him and his wife. A casual fan of Southampton, he is considering treating himself to a game in a hospitality box at St Mary’s, and potentially an away trip or two as a self-confessed ground hopper who has visited 45 of the 92 English Football League grounds.
The Super 6 is famously free to play and Tom, who had only been playing it via the app for a year, estimates he spent 30 seconds picking his scores on the Saturday morning. He hasn’t gambled for years, saying the most he’d ever won previously was around £80 on an accumulator.
He plans to continue to play Super 6. “I’m still competing with my friends and family. That's what was the most important thing to me in the first place – beating them. I wasn't focused on any financial gain. You get five points for a correct score so I got 30 in gameweek three.”
How did he get on in game week four, as a millionaire? “I only I got nine points that week – but I’m still top of our league.”
Fair play son, fair play.
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