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Hindsight: Five steps to heaven

On Friday, we brought you five betting tips ahead of the weekend’s sporting action, all of which lost. Here are the five which could have won you €1.2m.

WE REALLY NEED to review our betting strategy after bringing you another five losers in Friday’s Five Steps to Heaven column. You should have ignored our advice and backed these five instead.

1. When we were making our betting selections on Friday afternoon, we put all of our faith in Tommy Bowe, picking him to be first try-scorer at 8/1.

Unfortunately, Tommy didn’t really produce the goods for us on Sunday. We should have went with Jamie Heaslip who was available at much more generous odds of 14/1.

2. Our prediction of a draw in the Carling Cup Final was very nearly spot on. In fact, if it wasn’t for Wojciech Szczesny and Laurent Koscielny’s comical last-minute defending, we would have had a nice 3/1 winner to boast about.

In hindsight, we might have backed the underdog but that seemed a little bit unlikely. A Birmingham win was there for the taking at 11/2.

3. After Kevin McManamon scored Dublin’s second goal after just 14 minutes of Saturday night’s game against Kerry, we thought that the Dubs would vindicate our prediction of a 4 to 7 point win at 9/2.

Unfortunately, Pat Gilroy’s men took their foot off the pedal in the second half and were lucky to cling on for a single-point victory in the end. We could have backed that at 11/4.

4. The World Matchplay Championship came to a close on Sunday as Luke Donald saw off the new world number one Martin Kaymer to claim a 3&2 victory.

We thought that G-Mac was sitting pretty on Friday afternoon, and tipped him at 13/2. We really shouldn’t have overlooked Lukey who was available at 12/1 before his third-round match against Italian youngster Matteo Manassero.

5. You’ll excuse us for not correctly predicting that England and India’s Cricket World Cup clash would end in a thrilling tie. The optimists here have pointed out that we were only one run away from seeing our banker on India come in at 4/7.

Draws are so rare in one-day cricket that bookies don’t generally offer odds on them. Although we probably could have named our price on Friday afternoon, we’ve settled for a modest 25/1 for the purposes of our calculation.

Stake: €10

Returns: €1,235,812.50