Dead Rubber

The final installment of this year's State of Origin Rugby League competish was, of course, a dead rubber with Qld having swept the series in two games, it was still wildly popular though for Nine sealing the night for them post 8.30.

There's only one problem for the net - their week has turned into a dead rubber.

Even with the power of State of Origin, Nine has very little prospect of taking out the week, this is a staggering development

4 days in (despite winning prime time last night with a 30% share) Nine is in overall third place with a 24.7% share to Ten's 26.5% and Seven's 25.4%.

In the past no matter what state Nine was in overall - they could always be assured of taking out an origin week, and this is even going back to the days where the game was only shown north of the Murray.

This time around the final State of Origin has collided with the final week of Masterchef, surely the phenomenon of the year.

Ten has aired another 90 minutes of the show tonight (Thursday) as well as the second season premiere of Rush (a show which had everything going for it last year bar the timeslot) they should pull off a win for the night (though with Grey's Anatomy it will be close fought).

Even though Seven will win Friday and possibly take out the week - I cannot see Nine's Saturday being enough to get them out of third place - this is a disaster for a network that is just lurching from one to the next without a break.

This week it was the axing of "This Afternoon" a 4.30 skein designed to muscle in on Seven News. Like a lot of Nine's failures, it was trying to imitate a formula successful on it's rival (in this case Sunrise), it was shot in the foot one week in with the shock defection of newsreader Mark Ferguson and the ratings never took off.

Nine axed the long running (at least 15 years and probably more) Brisbane Extra to make way for the program, which lasted less than 3 weeks - well played!