FANS will be treated to a feast of free-to-air football as Easter and Anzac Day weekends collide to provide nine mega encounters to a national audience in the space of 11 days.
Meanwhile, Fox Footy will produce a stand-alone Friday night game when West Coast hosts Port Adelaide at Optus Stadium on Good Friday night.
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And the AFL will consider locking in combatants North Melbourne and Essendon if the 4:20pm Good Friday twilight game is successful.
Gold Coast has zero Channel Seven produced games. It means that while the Suns games will be broadcast every week into the Queensland market on 7mate, they'll have no free-to-air exposure to a national audience. The Suns had one Seven produced game this year.
Brisbane doesn't fare much better in terms of national exposure, receiving just three Channel Seven games, but has at least won the right to host a huge game against Collingwood on the Thursday night to open the Easter footy bonanza.
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With just three Thursday games surrounding the three bye weekends in the middle of the season, there will only be three mid-season weekends where there are only three games of footy on a Saturday.
It will make for a total of just eight Thursday night games, one more than last season.
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The ability to give each club one five-day break if necessary could have made room for more, but the League decided against it.
"We feel like certainly for 2019 it's about the right number, I don't see it increasing by a whole lot going forward," fixture boss Travis Auld said.
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The Kangaroos will face their third different opponent in three years when they host the Bombers on Good Friday afternoon on Channel Seven.
Auld confirmed the League will consider locking in the participating teams for Good Friday at some point.
"We need to make a decision about whether at some stage we lock in two teams for a period of time, three to five years and give it a go," he said.
"That's a conversation we'll have after this has all settled down."
All games are also available on Telstra's AFL Live Official App.
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