TWO of the biggest football games of the season will be held in Brisbane on Friday and we know the loser . . . you.
Incredibly, inexcusably and hopefully never again, two blockbusters from rival codes have been scheduled in the same Friday time timeslot . . . the Broncos will play the Cowboys at Suncorp Stadium while the Lions will take on Collingwood at the Gabba.
Any sports fan who can find a spare taxi in Brisbane at 10pm on Friday should immediately be conscripted to the search for Osama bin Laden.
Brisbane has become a city full of sports "floaters" fans who support the city first and the team second and go to whatever is hot.
Regrettably the floating fan has been torpedoed.
He or she must go to one venue or the other or, even worse, sit on the couch at home with an itchy trigger finger on the remote, finding the enjoyment of the games diluted by trying to watch both for that crucial hour after 8.30pm when they overlap.
Lions chief executive Michael Bowers said five months ago it would be "absolute madness" if the two games clashed. Sadly they have.
Surprisingly, neither club seems to be bleeding at the box office.
The Lions believe they may beat last year's Gabba high of 34,000 recorded against Geelong and the Broncos are tipping 40,000-45,000.
Collingwood is a massive drawcard because it is a club that has the gilt-edged box-office appeal of being widely loved and even more widely hated.
But the games will still cannibalise each other with TV ratings and will cost each other a few thousand fans, which is regrettable because these two splendid events deserve their own grand stage.
The Broncos-Cowboys match is a celebration of 100 years of rugby league in Queensland while the Lions are keen to prove themselves in the Friday night timeslot in the hope of scheduling further games there.
The cross-code clash all but became reality on October 26 last year when the AFL put out its draw.
AFL officials claimed then, that because it was the first code to take the Friday timeslot, it was rugby league's responsibility to accept the challenge and program the Broncos-Cowboys match on a Sunday.
The trouble was that rugby league officials, though they had released only the weekend's games and not the timeslots, knew Friday night would be the Broncos' destiny because Channel 9, which has the final say on match-of-the-round rights, wanted it that way.
The argument has lobbed back and forth for months.
AFL fans say their code has the courage to announce its full broadcast schedule for the winter at the start of the season so it is not reduced to the whims of TV planners at a few weeks' notice. (League allocates its games a few weeks beforehand.)
But league officials argue that it would have taken only a phone call from AFL headquarters to their league counterparts for the AFL boys to learn the Friday slot which the Lions hadn't touched in Brisbane for six years would be occupied by the Broncos-Cowboys derby.
League has paid the price for being beaten to the punch in its confirmation of dates.
The AFL has paid the price for not doing its checks or simply being over-ambitious.
In Melbourne, the AFL could schedule a major game against a royal wedding and it would smack some white bottom.
But in Queensland it needs more sensitive programming, a touch of the Kenny Rogers in knowing when to hold and fold them.
Humility is not a strong point of the AFL but sometimes, when an opponent is firing rockets at you, it's smarter to hide in your bunker for a while before firing back.
The AFL will lose the TV ratings battle to league because in Brisbane it always does.
The Lions and Broncos have massive crowd appeal this season because they are both at fascinating stages of their development.
Lions crowds have watched home games over the past two decades where they knew their side would win by 60 points and, in other years, where they expected to lose by that or more.
This is an in-between year. No one seems sure what they are capable of.
It's interesting and exciting. They may have been beaten by West Coast on Saturday night but it was a hell of a scrap. They've got something. We don't yet know how much.
The Broncos are in a similar boat. They thrashed Penrith in the first round but people were so unconvinced of their true worth that in last week's Courier-Mail, nine of the 12 tipsters went with the Roosters to beat them on Good Friday.
They made fools of the pundits (me included) and look set to outshine the expectations of everyone bar themselves this year.
