I’d say that’s wrong and it was 2.50pm WST/4.50pm EST, going by the fact that AFL Tables had a game in Perth in the following round (a Sunday night before an ANZAC Day substitute holiday) listed as “9pm WST/11pm EST” which is obviously wrong.
2.50 Perth time would let it be back-to-back with the game in Adelaide. GWN would therefore have been screening it live; sounds like they weren’t showing it live against the gate in Perth itself.
I’m a little bit confused by that regional schedule as to how “TNT” and “Southern Cross” were listed separately. I take it that one is probably meant to be Seven Central, but those times don’t make sense either. (Imparja in 1999 being blank is correct as those games would’ve been on Seven Central by then.) But that still a little odd as I thought Southern Cross TAS/TNT even then was taking Friday night live, unless that only started happening with digital television and TDT? Can’t imagine Ten was doing much that would’ve stopped them taking that many games.
Out of the regional operators there, some notes:
- I’m not sure whether the Wagga feed of Prime opted out to take Friday night AFL separately from the rest of southern NSW (at 8.30) - pretty sure it did for a time, being an AFL stronghold, not sure it was doing it by this point.
- Out of the solus operators, MTN in Griffith isn’t listed simply because they had their second channel up and running by then, and thus would have just got the “[Prime] southern NSW” feed (without any additional games as their Prime supplementary channel came via Orange, not Wagga).
I’m also reminded of seeing how MTN handled the overlap between being a primary Nine/WIN affiliate but also taking the AFL (Griffith, like Wagga, definitely has an interest in both league and Aussie rules), when Nine moved their Sunday (ARL) replay from highlights at 6.30pm to a full replay at 4pm, leading to a clash for a couple of years.
In those cases, the AFL would get priority for the full game, and MTN would jump out at the first break after the final siren to re-join Nine and the second half of the rugby league (at about 4.50pm). I’m pretty sure this usually happened even if Seven Sydney were taking a 1pm AFL game (generally a Swans or Brisbane Lions home game) - as there would typically be also a 2pm game in Melbourne that Seven would take the second half of.
I definitely saw that with my own eyes on MTN sometime in 1997, just before the second channel started. I’m not entirely sure what the mix between league and AFL was on other days - AFL was on Saturday afternoon as there was no game on Nine then, but I was never up late enough at my relatives to know which footy they took on Friday night (reasonably confident it was the league but couldn’t be sure), or whether they took Saturday night games when played in Sydney prior to Prime starting up (due to the Swans actually being good for once). Of course they would’ve had the Monday night league too, which would’ve been Super League that year.
Although there were many other reasons MTN they chose Prime as their second channel (it effectively was a re-activation of their link to their old Midstate 689 cousins in Orange), as a side effect it also helped untangle that messy clash into 1998 and beyond.
