Third Ashes cricket test rates for Nine THE third test in the Ashes cricket series continues to score for the Nine Network. Nine secured its second consecutive peak audience of more than 2.5 million viewers nationally as Australia continued to turn the screws on England. Sunday's third session averaged 1.739 million capital-city viewers and 2.600 million nationally after Saturday's broadcast had a national average audience of 2.079 million for the day and a metropolitan audience of 1.362 million for the final session. Sunday's second session averaged 1.612 million, and the opening session 1.359 million, as the cricket took out three of the top four ranking programs of the day. Nine News Sunday averaged 1.522 million, with discrete audiences of more than 450,000 viewers in Sydney and in Melbourne. The cricket pushed Nine to a 30.0 per cent channel share on Sunday evening and a 36.7 per cent network share. Gem also took cricket as some states went to National Nine News. Even The lunch-time The Cricket Show averaged 1.115 million viewers. The best non-Nine program on Sunday was Seven News (934,000). Border Security followed with 801,000 viewers. Copyright in the data is owned by OzTAM and may not be used or reproduced without permission.