Firstly congratulations to Ricky Ponting and Michael Clarke for winning last night’s Allan Border Medal — Australia’s prestigious award for the country’s best international cricketer for the past 12 months. You can find all the award winner’s here.
However, the Allan Border Medal — which screened at the prime time slot of 9.30pm managed to average only a national audience of 540,000. The programmes it competed against were: Seven’s popular All Saints (1.298 million), Ten’s new show Lie to me (1.498 million), the rescreening of Melbournes waterfront dispute drama, Bastard Boys on the ABC and that ratings behemoth — the SBS News (256,000).
State by state breakdown looks like this: 144,000 in Sydney; 180,000 in Melbourne; 92,000 in Brisbane; 48,000 in Adelaide and 76,000 in Perth.
This would concern Cricket Australia and Channel Nine.
Let’s compare cricket’s night of nights with that of the AFL — the Brownlow Medal. Last September, Channel Ten’s Brownlow telecast commanded a national TV audience of 1.084 million.
Why the difference?
Well after watching the AB Medal last night it lurched from one cringe worthy moment to the next — culminating in the award’s MC, Mark Nicholas, asking the women attending the awards to vote for cricket’s “Pin up of the year” based on the “Men of Cricket” calandar.
It was not clear if they had to write their votes on napkins with lipstick.
With primetime ratings that match up against previous TV disasters like Monster House and Taken Out — Cricket Australia (and Channel Nine) better think of a better way to honour Australian cricket and Allan Border.
If this is a sign of interest in Australian cricket at the moment then how will next year fare. And the year after that?
