Do you recall if 9 showed Monday night football on delay at 8.30? And if so did Optus show Monday night’s live?
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My understanding is it was because ratings were expected to be poor due to the ARL super league split. Monday night super league was also shown on 9 at 9.30.
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Nine definitely showed the Monday night games in 1996, and yes they were 8.30pm games. In 1997 that became their Super League slot - with the other game on free-to-air often being a Saturday night?? game of some sort (doubt it was live either) shown by the ABC, but I’m not sure that was all year.
The score bug definitely shows it was a Nine production (Sports Australia’s own coverage never used that back then), so that’s not surprising. But I also thought they were still showing the Sunday replays at 6.30pm too, maybe that was the first year they showed it at 4pm? Because they didn’t put the score bug in the one-hour highlights.
As above, I suspect Nine didn’t - unless Fox had their own call of Monday night - but the ABC took Fox’s coverage for their games during that season. (The ABC also had rights to one UK Super League game a week during that time.)
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I think the ABC super league game was a replay at 5pm Sunday
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Yes. This was the schedule in 1997
Nine Friday Night ARL 9:30pm - 2hr delay
Nine Saturday Arvo ARL 4:00pm - 1hr delay
ABC Sunday Arvo SL 5:00pm - 2.5 hr delay
Nine Monday Night SL 9:30pm - 2hr delay
Quite a lot of changes for FTA from previous years, both good and bad thanks to the war.
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Super League game on FOX Sports (appears to be live kicking off at 5pm) - interesting panel with Cam Williams and Steve Mortimer hosting on Super Sunday. Features Cronulla’s Dean Treister and David Peachey as guests on the panel. Also has a cross for Fox Sports News with Caroline Searcy at half-time.
Callers are Warren Boland and Gary Freeman.
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Promo for Ch7s Sarajevo Winter Olympics telecast - February 1984
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For those who do not know what music theme 10 used for coverage of the 1996 Melbourne Cup Carnival, the name of theme music is called “Power and Imagination” by Adam Routh.
Just google “Power and Imagination by Adam Routh” as you will not find it on Spotify at all.
https://youtu.be/zieBkHBP9CM?si=joan3yKO96DXcRHr (Intro Ends 1:21)
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I have a lot of S12 games downloaded from 1997-2000 and Channel Seven produced those games for Fox. Gordon Bray called most of those games. David Fordham, who was studio host for the 99 World Cup on Seven called a Reds-Highlanders game in 99, while Steve Davie called the 2 games in 2000 that were part of double headers on Fox due to daylight saving (NSW game at 7pm, then QLD game at 8pm QLD/9pm NSW). When Fox took over in 2001, they flew Tony Johnson out to Ballymore for those games.
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One from left field
Lou Richards noddies (reaction shots), for a Coodabeens story.
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One score bug oddity for rugby league that IIRC was only tried once, especially on Nine: imitating the then Fox Sports US score bug (used notably for NFL but also for things like baseball across Fox over-the-air and Fox Sports Net at the time) and having it stretch across the whole top of the screen, rather than just in the corner.
They tried this for the pre-season Charity Shield match in 2002, and although the rest of the graphics survived to the regular season, the score bug ended up reverting to something similar to 2001:
It looked like a proof of concept but in hindsight I don’t actually don’t mind it, especially compared to what they eventually went with.
Fox Sports apparently tried the same - this bar ended up being moved to the bottom in the regular season (and for other sports like NBL basketball and even swimming) but more or less ended up unscathed:
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I never knew Nine had Charity Sheild tv rights back then. How long did this last until it was only on Fox Sports?
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It may well has been intended as a once-off for Nine (I can’t recall if they bothered in the 90s or in the years after this).
The big reason, of course (and I totally forgot), was that this was the year Souths were re-admitted to the NRL after two years out - so there was a lot more interest surrounding the Charity Shield than there might otherwise have been.
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Oh, ok. That explains that then.
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Would have worked better if it was at the bottom of the screen.
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I think we (well, royal we as in the industry but also viewers… I’m definitely the latter!) were all learning as to the best place to put a full-width score bug like that (if you used one at all).
These are examples of US Fox’s graphics in 2001 that I clipped from YouTube (1, 2)
Fox Sports Net (the regional networks) used it too, just replace the “NFL/MLB on Fox” logos with the FSN one of the time; generally other sports on FSN like regional ice hockey used the style seen in the baseball above.
The top bar was only new to Fox in the 2001 seasons so it was a “new fad” for both Aussie Fox and Nine to try… obviously it didn’t work out and in Fox’s case, found its home down the bottom quite nicely.
US Fox may have chosen to do this (both nationally and for their regionals) because of the “around the grounds” updates… it wasn’t “all the time” back then - that was still more the signature of ESPN - but you still got them once a quarter or so, or the baseball equivalent, down the bottom.
Nine eventually moved their NRL score bug down the bottom in 2003 but kept it as a corner thing; of course the new AFL telecasts on Nine did their own thing.
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