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New South Wales Anthony Minichiello (centre) celebrates after scoring a try against Queensland during game 2 of the State of Origin Rugby League series in Sydney, Wednesday, June 15, 2011. Queensland lead the series with a win in game 1. (AAP Image/Dean Lewins)
Amidst all the talk of restructuring the NRL representative calendar recently, perhaps the most telling comment was David Gallop’s observation a fortnight ago that Channel Nine would be reluctant to give up the current midweek Origin slot.
“One of the beauties of Origin football is that it’s on a weeknight”, Gallop said.
“We get clear air and we get that build-up time for the players to be in camp… It all builds on the intensity of Origin and those are the things we’re looking at at the moment.”
We could quibble with just how important a midweek slot (with the implication of less on air competition from rival programs) is to Origin’s appeal as a TV product. But of Australia’s top 10 most watched TV programs in the OzTam era, four of the five sporting events to appear were televised on a Saturday or Sunday.
What isn’t in any doubt, however, is how important stellar Origin ratings are to Nine – and how fiercely they’ll oppose any changes to the schedule that might make things better from the NRL purist’s point of view, but more difficult for the broadcaster.
Throw in a ruthlessly compliant and conservative NRL and it seems clear that nothing substantive will change, despite all the sensible arguments for a rep season re-think.
Here are a few numbers that might make Nine’s (and the NRL’s) seeming intransigence on the scheduling issue a little more understandable:
Game I of this year’s Origin series attracted an average of over 2.2 million capital city viewers in Australia. The ratings for Game II were only slightly lower, with an average of around 2.15 million.
Throw in around 1.2 million viewers combined in regional markets of Queensland, northern NSW, southern New South Wales and Victoria (for whom ratings are compiled in a separate survey), and strength in the key younger demographic, and you have a fairly good sense of the weight of numbers up against the argument for any sort of change.
Perhaps more importantly, if past experience is anything to go by, the ratings for Wednesday night’s Origin decider could make the figures for Game I and Game II look somewhat pedestrian.
In fact, in the countdown to kickoff in a little over a day’s time, Nine and NRL executives will be quietly confident that this year’s third Origin match might set a new viewership record for the interstate series.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the TV ratings should give 2009’s record capital city figure a big shake.
The hype for this series in general has been massive, and the pundits have been busy pondering the decider’s potential status as The Biggest Origin Game of All Time.
Having the series go down to the third game obviously helps. Over the last six years, on every occasion Game III has been ‘live’ – 2008, 2006 and 2005 – it has attracted the strongest ratings of any match in the series.
A full graphical history of the game-by-game capital city figures is available.
There are other sources of support, too.
The largest rugby league (and overall) TV market in Australia – Sydney – is also the most fickle when it comes to watching the ‘home’ state (whereas for club and representative football, Queenslanders will watch almost anything in big numbers, provided it involves Queenslanders).
Sydney ratings have tended to spike when hype around the series is at its highest, with the two strongest rating games in recent history being the opening matches of the 2010 and 2011 series (the first followed the massive barney in Origin III 2009, and the second involved the controversy surrounding Ricky Stuart’s controversial selections for the opening game).
Up in Brisbane, where ratings have recently been somewhat higher for games played at Suncorp rather than away, you have the perfect storm: a series decider, at home, for the most successful Origin team ever, in a match which represents the last hurrah for legendary captain Darren Lockyer – the biggest farewell since King Wally.
Even down in Melbourne ratings have been humming along pretty respectably in recent years after Nine belatedly began showing some modicum of faith in the Southern TV prospects for its most valuable ratings product.
Taking a rough stab, 1.1 million viewers in Sydney, 850 thousand in Brisbane and 300 thousand in Melbourne seems to be a reasonably conservative ‘par’ for Game III.
These are all around the higher end of numbers which have been achieved before for Origin matches – and they could even be on the conservative side given the special appeal of Game III this year.
Throw in between 50 and 200 thousand combined viewers in the rugby league “other” of Adelaide and Perth – depending on when Nine deign to show the thing – and you are within poking distance of an Origin capital city ratings record.
Add another 1.2 million plus regional viewers and you have a total average audience somewhere in the 3.5 million plus range – and a peak audience that probably reads “four-point something” million.
All of which means that, whatever the result, there will be a story tucked away in every paper about another smashing Origin ratings success – and another good reason to think that when it comes to NRL season scheduling, while major changes are needed, nothing major will be changing any time soon.
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