This one might annoy you.
Back in 2017, a 58 year old woman who was fed up of her husband and son hogging the TV to watch the football every weekend, decided to put a bet on just to make her enforced footy watching a bit more entertaining.
She went for a ridiculous 12-fold acca, picking six home teams and six away teams to win based purely on which team she most liked the sound of.
She knew nothing about football, and actually ended up with the majority of predictions on the ticket being outsiders.
The games and results she chose, along with the individual odds and final result can be seen below:
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Huddersfield to beat West Brom: 6/4 – 1-0 victory
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Bournemouth to beat Newcastle: 5/2 – 1-0 victory
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Burnley to beat Southampton: 4/1 – 1-0 victory
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Brighton to beat Swansea: 15/8 – 1-0 victory
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Sheff Wed to beat Aston Villa: 5/2 – 2-0 victory
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Barnsley to beat Birmingham: 11/8 – 2-0 victory
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Bolton to beat Norwich: 11/5 – 2-1 victory
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Reading to beat Derby: 16/5 – 4-2 victory
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Ipswich to beat Preston: 8/5 – 3-0 victory
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Burton to beat Millwall: 10/3 1-0 victory
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Nottingham Forest to beat QPR: 11/10 – 4-0 victory
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Sheff Utd to beat Hull: 8/11 – 4-1 victory
As you can see, the bet came in, against all the odds, and netted the lucky woman from Leysdown-on-Sea £574,278.41 – and right before Christmas too.
92nd Minute Goal to the Rescue
NWCherries98, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The most dramatic fixture on the acca turned out to be number two on the betslip; Bournemouth vs Newcastle.
The game was all but over at 0-0 in the 91st minute, which would have killed the 12-fold accumulator stone dead before it even got started, but then Steve Cooke got involved.
In the 92nd minute, he headed home from a corner giving Bournemouth a late winner, 3 points, and lifting them out of the relegation zone.
Little did he know it, but he had also just made our unwitting punter a very rich lady.
The staff member at the William Hill branch where the bet was placed, was quoted saying:
“It is incredible that the lady got them all up. Usually customers laugh when they see a payout figure on the bottom of their slip like £574,000, but this just goes to show it can happen.”
What’s funny about this, is that the lady’s husband had been doing the £1 weekend acca since he was 18, giving him about 40 years worth of experience on his wife, and have hardly ever won a penny.
He might get a bit of a hard time down the pub for knowing less about football than his wife, but with almost £600k in the bank, he can probably handle it with a smile.