It was another normal Thursday night, with the NRL and AFL Footy shows again failing to fire. Lost won the night, taking Seven into first spot; Nine was second. The NRL Footy Show was especially weak in Sydney and Brisbane, despite the Australia-New Zealand test match tonight, the game the League authorities don’t want to call the ANZAC Test, despite it being named thus in all their season guides.

The two footy shows attracted a total of 1.057 million viewers nationally, with 299,000 for the NRL show in Sydney, lineball with a week ago, and 134,000 in Brisbane, down on a week ago. The AFL show in Melbourne attracted 389,000 people, roughly in line with a week earlier.

Seven’s Amazing Race was more popular in the 9:30pm to 10:30pm timeslot, but not enough to influence the overall outcome on the night. Lost gathered more than 1.9 million viewers to power Seven to a clear win, 32.6% to 28.1% across the five major markets. Ten was third with 20.2%, the ABC was fourth on 14.2% and as usual SBS was fifth with a 4.8% audience share last night.

In Sydney, Seven was again a bigger winner than nationally with a 32.5% share to Nine’s 27.2%. Nine News moved past Seven News after losing on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights. The margin to Nine was around 90,000 viewers. But in Sydney no such joy for Nine, the news read by Mark Ferguson running second to the Ian Ross’s effort on Seven by 27,000 viewers.

Seven leads the week 31.1% to 29.0%. Nine will pick up tonight with the Rugby League test and the AFL game, while Seven runs the first episode of an Anzac mini-series that first went to air on Nine years ago. Seven picked up the rights, and has cut the series back from a slow 12 hours to around eight hours, to conclude on Sunday night.