Counting my blessings rather than winnings after an eventful week

Hearing the words “I'm bursting!” have never sounded as sweet as they did when my mum mumbled them to me in the early hours of Tuesday morning at Dorset County Hospital.

We had no idea whether Mum would even be able to speak again after much Monday drama, but the toughest woman I know awoke with a determination to empty her bladder and my dad and I breathed sighs of relief so loud that they could probably be heard in Somerset.

There is nothing like serious family strife to serve as a sharp reminder that the betting game which many of us get so wrapped up in is exactly that – a game. A mere game. A leisure pursuit. A spot of fun. When you are down to your last few beans, it can feel like more than a game, but it still is one. Nobody is forcing you to invest those beans – you just fancy a flutter to get your pulse racing. You are after a dollop of dopamine, the Angel Delight of the chemical world.

Well, my pulse was racing faster than Frankel with a bumble bee in his bottom when I thought I was losing Mum and I rapidly told her all the things I should say regularly but never do about how wonderful she is and always has been. She is unable to remember any of my overdue warm words, so I must have another crack when she fully recovers, but one completed positive from the harrowing events is that I have been injected with an overwhelming dose of punting perspective.

Not an actual injection – I do not think there is a syringe left in Dorset after the amount that my mum has got through this week – but an instilling of maximum awareness of where betting should be in my mental pecking order. It had been No. 1 for far too long – perversely that is always the case when I am in a losing rut, but less so when I am on a winning streak – and that is a position where it should never reside regardless of results.

Prior to Monday evening, I would have described the last betting week as “brutal”, but having shuffled the contents of my feeble mind around and unearthed some sense of relative importance, I have revised the verdict to “entertaining”.

It was a jolly entertaining betting week which started with the news that Louis Oosthuizen, my only selection for the Nedbank Challenge, had spent the night prior to the tournament labouring with kidney stones. It felt like a punch in my kidneys, but Oosthuizen shrugged off the handicap to fire a first-round 63 and set the pace.

With £240 each-way on Oosthuizen at 10-1 with bet365 – and another £210 at 10-1 elsewhere – I had suddenly become just a shade of odds-against to pocket five bags. The South African failed to kick on over the next two days, but a bright start to the final round saw him regain the lead and he was trading at 1.66 on Betfair.

The Nedbank turned nasty when Oosthuizen mishit his drive at the 11th hole and carded a double-bogey at the same time as Tommy Fleetwood was on a Sunday charge. Fleetwood took advantage of a hugely fortunate bounce off a sprinkler head beside the 15th green and suddenly Oosthuizen was playing for the places.

The £840 place return from my bet365 Oosthuizen investment (quarter the odds, first five places) still looked watertight despite the 11th-hole wobble and a birdie at the 13th made the money even more secure. All adrenaline left his system once he realised his winning chance had gone, though, and lacklustre Louis covered his final five holes in four over par.

A monstrous bogey putt at the 18th kept Oosthuizen in fifth place, but then his playing partner Thomas Detry rolled in a long putt of his own for birdie to knock my man down to sixth place. The 'entertainment' was immense. My riled mum, who often follows the golf even more feverishly than I do, texted: Oosty wants shooting!

I had no lust for any assassinations and quickly had the chance to forget about Oosthuizen by tuning into Michael van Gerwen's Grand Slam of Darts semi-final against Gerwyn Price. Once Mighty Mike had got through his tricky group, I jumped aboard him for Grand Slam glory, having £270 at 11-10 with Ladbrokes, then later another £178.75 at evens with Sportingbet.

I watched the semi-final with both my children while my wife was at the supermarket and we greeted every Van Gerwen 180 or successful checkout with living-room pandemonium. I was quaffing premium-strength lager to keep my throat moist as we enjoyed a darting ding-donger. Van Gerwen had never lost to Price in their previous 19 meetings, so I was noisily confident throughout, but the ever improving Welshman produced the performance of his life to triumph 16-12. My well was running dry.

The Mayakoba Classic was the last hope. I was winning five bags off Harris English from a combination of win-only and each-way wagers, and he led at the halfway stage before falling one shot behind going into the weather-delayed final day. At 12.30pm on Monday, I tuned into Sky Sports hoping to see English convert his birdie putt to tie for the lead with three holes to play, but he spurned that chance before carding a double-bogey at the 16th hole and, like with Oosthuizen, it was just a question of hoping to hang on for some place money.

English finished fifth on his own, so my £40 each-way at 50-1 with bet365 returned £540, keeping the wolf from my door for a while longer. It is funny how I was once chasing the face-spitter, then downgraded hopes to a mortgage-spitter, and am currently concentrating on an overdraft-spitter. My spitting targets, much like UK MPs, are not as impressive as they used to be.

I was gutted with the way the sporting weekend had turned out, sulking in my work-shed while studying for the tournaments ahead, but three hours later my dad called me and I was thrown into an emergency situation, abandoning my desk, dashing to the scene.

The only comical side of proceedings at the hospital was my clothing. To put it mildly, I do not need to dress up to work from home, and my outfit – dirty grey jumper, grey jogging pants, stripey socks and blue sliders, with unkempt hair and beard – meant I looked like a cross between an escaped prisoner and a tired tramp. I do not think I had many of the nurses at the A&E department swooning as I begged them to attend to my mum, but my ghastly appearance was the least of my worries.

Since the incident, I have been trying to care less about my quest for winning more and to fully appreciate what I already have. Sometimes I think it must be easier to get a nappy on a dolphin than my son, who wriggles around like a Super League player trying to get up from a muddy midden, but I chuckle about it now rather than get vexed. It is all part of life's rich tapestry and we must savour every moment.

Seize the day. You never know when it might be your last. And spending your last day weeping about the sporting frailties of Louis Oosthuizen, Michael van Gerwen or Harris English would, in my humble opinion, be a tragic way to conclude your precious Earth appearance.

Sporting Heroes

Francesco Totti

In politically incorrect days which have long since passed, my dear friend and colleague Henry Hardwicke used to march into public bars and shout: “Where's the totty?” at the top of his voice, before sitting down a few minutes later bemused as to why a bevy of beauties had not made their way over to see him.

When I spot that Roma are on the live-on-TV fixture list, I always think about Totti – the masterful attacking force that is Francesco Totti, a one-club player who represented Roma 619 times between 1992 and 2017, scoring 250 goals.

Totti had so many nicknames – Golden Boy, the Eighth King of Rome, Captain, Gladiator – and was the Italian David Beckham in terms of good looks and off-pitch celebrity.

In fact, Totti could probably walk into a public bar and shout: “Where's the Hardwicke?” and a queue of attractive ladies would form in front of him.