Roger Federer again showed his class last night in beating fellow Swiss Stan Wawrinka in five sets. In fact Federer had Seven executives salivating as he raced to a two-sets-to-love lead, then horrified as he slid and Stan came back, only to lose the fifth set to his one-time Swiss Davis Cup team mate. Federer will meet the winner of the Rafa Nadal v Grigor Dimitrov second men’s semi-final on tonight. In fact, Roger’s long match squashed the opposition and Seven grabbed more than 40% of the available audience last night in metros and more than 36% in the regionals. If Nadal wins through to the final, Seven will be hoping for a national audience close to 3 million.

Seven’s tennis audience last night was the biggest so far of this tournament: 1.560 million and another 219,000 who watched 7TWO from 6 to 7pm.

Over on Nine, Australia and Pakistan scored well over 670 runs in a slug-a-thon in which Australia outlasted the visitors to win the final game of the series and take it four matches to one. Some of the hitting by David Warner, Travis Head, Babar Azam and Sharjeel Khan was tip-and-run-like, but played under far tougher circumstances with higher quality bowling. But with Australia already winning the series, it was a a bit ho-hum for many viewers. Still an average of 1.045 million people watched from around 2.20pm to after 10pm (1.058 million for the second session, 1.031 million for the afternoon when Australia batted and Head and Warner battered their way into the record books).

And that was the night. Seven and Nine really squeezed hard on Ten and the ABC and their main channel shares in metro markets reflected that: 8.5% and 6.0% respectively.

In the regions Seven News won with 481,000 viewers, with Nine News on 429,000, The night session of Seven’s tennis was third with 413,000, Seven News/Today Tonight was fourth with 379,000 and the second session of the ODI was fifth with 331,000. — Read the rest of Glenn Dyer’s TV ratings here