EAGLE FARM'S 'SUPER SATURDAY"

By Graham Potter | Friday, May 27, 2022

After all of the bad weather, transferred and abandoned meetings, backlog of races etc … Queensland will be hosting its biggest race meeting ever at Eagle Farm on Saturday.

Sound a bit like an infomercial?

Well, it is the truth.

Never before has a meeting in Queensland included three Group 1’s, two Group 2’s, four Group 3’s with a Listed race to round off proceedings. No wonder Queensland is calling it their ‘Super Saturday.’

The Kingsford-Smith Cup, the Queensland Derby and the re-scheduled Doomben Cup, as Group 1’s, will all take centre stage … but the likes of The Roses and The Sires Produce (both Group 2’s), and of course those four Group 3’s, all adds to the spice and volume of the equine, training and riding talent that will all come together to provide what should be an exhilarating day of racing.

In many ways, the meeting also represents a southern invasion of the Sunshine State.

In the Group 1’s alone … including acceptances … forty out of the fifty-one runners are from visiting stables. Waller, Neasham, Snowden O’Shea, Pride, Hawkes, Walker, Cummings, Price … and others … all of the big names are there … as is the case with the top jockeys … McEvoy, Rawiller, King, Bowman, Parr, Kah, Avdulla, Bosson, Pike … just to name a few.

As always, the chances of the locals not being washed away by the tidal wave sweeping in from the south is a tough gig, but the likes of trainers Tony Gollan, Steven O’Dea and Matt Hoysted, Robert Heathcote, Desleigh Forster and Chris Munce … along with star local riders such as Ryan Maloney, Samantha Collett, Ben Thompson and Jimmy Orman … will all be striving to keep at least some of the prize-money at home.

The visitors already have one Group 1 win guaranteed on the scoreboard as every runner in the Doomben Cup is from a visiting stable.

It should be a day of grand theatre, set up with high stakes races being played out by the best cast possible.

Not even the weather should be able to get in the way of this one if Eagle Farm can live up to its rating of being one of the best draining tracks around.

For what it is worth, the current forecast in Brisbane is for rain over the next couple of days with Saturday predicted to be ‘mostly sunny.’

Not certain what that means exactly, but, on the racing front at least, the prediction for Saturday suggests a very, very bright day for the Queensland Winter Carnival in which the cream of the country’s top talent will engage in a series of intense, highly competitive battles for a share of the significant honours on offer.

It is a day’s racing that is looked forward to with keen anticipation.

On the back of the dark and wet times of the last couple of weeks, it could not come at a better time.