Happy Lucky Dragon Win | Moreira's magic turns championship on its head … again!

Little wonder Joao Moreira earned the nickname “the Magic Man” as on Wednesday night he seemed to stun even himself as he re-ignited the jockeys’ championship with a four-timer that relegated Zac Purton to runner-up on all four occasions. Now it seems only the under-scrutiny stewards stand in the way of the somewhat wayward Brazilian mounting a serious challenge to Purton claiming his holy grail.

As Purton went on his own winning surge, Moreira had been cooling his heels on the sideline, serving back-to-back three-meeting bans for careless riding and watching winners he would have been on; wondering all the while whether he would still have the magic when he returned.

“People say it takes time when you come back from a break like that, to get things to click back into place, but tonight it just happened right away,” he said. Well, things clicked all right – straight up in race one and they only got better from there.

Three weeks ago, just as Moreira was about to serve his six-meeting stretch, we framed a market on the championship and had Purton 1.9, Douglas Whyte 2.9, and Moreira 3.3.

If this market were real, and opinions expressed on social media were actual money, firstly there would be a lot of poor idiots, and secondly, Purton and Whyte would have been our big hypothetical firmers.

We heard from no one who said they thought Moreira was too big a price – out of sight, out of mind, I guess. As Purton’s win total nearly doubled that of his nearest rival, which wasn’t even Whyte, his supporters wanted the 1.9.