Last Saturday was the closest the favourite-hugging lawyer and the Mug have come to a big score on the quaddie. So close, in fact, that it’s taken me almost a week to commit the fateful day to print.

I think before the tale of woe, it’s worth a recap on the history of the mugpunter quaddie. We took our first bet on a quaddie on 3 June 2006 and have missed only 1 week since. The layout has been between $40 and $50 every week split between the 2 of us - I can recall only once we’ve stayed under $40 and we’ve never exceeded $50. We always take a half unit (none of this flexi nonsense). All up that must mean that we’ve been onto this for just on a year and have kicked in about $1200 each.

The wins are easy to remember because they’re not that regular! The best has been a $925 collect (split 2 ways). In all, we’ve had 5 collects. The others (all split 2 ways) - $275, $150, $27.50 (yes, no kidding - a fat quaddie as well!) and $300. My rough maths works this out at a net loss of about $700 ($350 each) over a year.

Now for what is an oodle of fun, I don’t find that too bad - lots of interest studying the form, plenty of near misses (8 times 3 legs and 2nd, 3rd and 4th in the other) and lots of yelling at the screen (yes, Danny Brereton is a c#$t).

But last week was almost too hard to take. As we went through our regular Saturday process of negotiating an amenable set of selections, we pretty quickly reached agreement on 3 legs - a standout on Lucky Secret and then 3 legs with 4 or 5 selections. We quickly settled on 4 in the first leg and 5 in the last. We had 5 picks in the 3rd leg, which for some bizarre reason we decided we had to skinny down to 4.

2 things here; 1, we have taken a $50 quaddie about 10 times in the last year - why did we not take it today; 2, we decided between our final 2 picks on the toss of a coin and it came down between 13 and 14 - 13 was the winner.

But unfortunately, only of the coin toss!! The winner of the actual leg of the quaddie, of course, was 14 (Manhattan Treasure at $12). The other 3 legs - cakewalks - and of course, 2nd 3rd and 4th in the leg we didn’t land. The quaddie result - $4292.90 for 50c unit (split 2 ways as always - a cool $2k plus change)

I’m still cryin’ ……