As per his usual careful and precise planning and placement of runners, powerhouse trainer Ciaron Maher will only send out two starters at the Metropolitan meeting at the Sunshine Coast on Saturday … Mr Buster and Negotiations … both last start winners.
Mr Buster has a second placing and an unbeaten run of three straight wins to his name since he headed north to Queensland. He will carry topweight in the second race on the Sunshine Coast card where he will jump as the race favourite when he goes out to bid for four-in-a-row.
Negotiations found winning form under 60kg two weeks ago and he could well be good enough to go on with it again in the tenth and last race … but, whatever these two runners do result-wise on the day, the fact they are competing here is part of a quietly unfolding story.
It sometimes arrives so gradually … ghosting in almost … so that you don’t really notice it until it is there.
You could say that about Ciaron Maher’s progressive, measured move up the Queensland Trainer’s Premiership ladder in the last twelve months … and here you should note that we are looking at that as a completely separate entity to the high profile feature race success Maher enjoys every year in the Sunshine State and all around Australia.
Maher currently sits in fourth place on the Brisbane Trainers’ Premiership … with his successful selective targeting of horses he sends north giving him a quite outstanding 38.7 percent winning strike rate so far this season.
Compare that to the two previous seasons.
Maher finished fifteenth on the Brisbane ladder in 2024/25 with fourteen winners, just two more than he has already posted for the current season which has only been in play for three-and-a-half months.
That’s quite a leap.
Go back to the 2023/24 season and you have to keep scrolling down until you find Maher in thirty-second place on the Brisbane Premiership ladder on five winners for the full season, so the steepness of the Maher ascent on the Brisbane ladder has been quite pronounced and you have got to believe that upward trend will continue.
Chris Waller’s Queensland ‘satellite’ yard has long since established the champion interstate-based trainers’ formidable presence in Queensland with Waller having finished in second place in the Brisbane Trainer’s Premiership four times in a row dating back to the 2020/21 season.
Now, with Maher seemingly starting to commit more to the Brisbane battleground, it can be anticipated that the country’s top two trainers will be very prominent figures in terms of the leading players on the Brisbane trainers’ Premiership ladder moving forward.
Not that the most competitive of the local trainers will go quietly.
Thankfully for the local trainers’ brand, twelve-time Trainers’ Premiership winner Tony Gollan has built his Brisbane Trainers’ Premiership winning sequence into a seemingly impenetrable fortress that should prove to be unshakeable for some time to come.
The Chris and Corey Munce training partnership has found a new gear. They have been providing winner after winner this season to facilitate a rapid climb into second place on the ladder, while another multiple premiership winner Robert Heathcote is always thereabouts.
That doesn’t change the fact the Ciaron Maher is on the move in Queensland.
If Mr Buster and/or Negotiations win tomorrow, by sundown at the Sunshine Coast Maher could well be sitting in a lofty third place on the Brisbane Trainers’ Premiership ladder.
As stated earlier, sometimes you don’t see it coming until it is there.
