Adebayor 's `football miracle' at four that allowed him to walk!

London, Feb.3 (ANI): Football star Emmanuel Adebayor has revealed he could not walk till he was four, and managed to do so after experiencing a miracle during his childhood.

The Arsenal and Togo striker is currently regarded as one of the finest athletes in the game.

Yet, as a young boy, his mother, Alice, feared he would never even walk, and she carried her son all across Africa in search of a cure."My mum took me to Nigeria, Lagos, Ghana and all the villages in Africa but nothing happened. It got to the stage where they took me to a church and told my mum they'd pray for me for a week. They said that, if I did not walk by the end of that week, it meant I would never walk. It was a strange thing to say and you can understand why Mum was crying. They started praying at midnight on the Sunday. All the week, I'm not walking. By Saturday midnight my mum was all over the place, crying. For her, it was all over," Adebayor recalls.

"Anyway, I was in the church laying down and, around nine or ten o'clock on the Sunday morning, I could hear children playing outside. Suddenly somebody kicked a ball into the church. And the first person to stand up and run was me, because I wanted to get that ball. My mum was afraid because she had never even seen me walking and suddenly I was running after a ball," he told the Sun.

"And all the people in the church who had been praying for me told my mum, 'Your son is walking because of football. It must mean the boy has football in his blood.'

"It's an amazing story. But it is true. My mum has told me about it all my life." (ANI)