The state election had stiff competition as Queenslanders lined up at the polling stations.
There was a collective moan among devotees, earphones plugged firmly into their heads, as Saturday morning advanced.
Shaun Marsh, on 51, had been caught at mid-off from an easy ball from Stuart Broad.
Annastacia Palaszczuk, you'd imagine, isn't much of a cricket tragic.
Political campaigners turn their calendars into knots to ensure elections do not coincide with, say, football grand finals, fearing fans would take revenge on politicians for having the nerve to interrupt a sacred day.
Queensland's Labor Premier has taken such a risk and supercharged it.
The Ashes are being played. The third day of the first Test, with all the drama of Australia struggling under assault from the Poms, was underway.
At the Gabba. In Brisbane.
Around 30,000 spectators had filed out to the Gabba during the morning.
Had many of them voted? Would they interrupt their day at the ground to slip off to do their democratic duty and scoff a democracy sausage? TVs and radios everywhere were tuned to the game.
Outside Brisbane's central polling booth at City Hall, there seemed more campaign workers handing out how-to-vote cards than voters. A young man from The Greens chatted with an LNP worker, and both of them said they could barely believe how quiet things were.
"I guess a lot of people got in early with their pre-polls," said the Greens' campaigner.
In fact, a record 23 per cent of Queenslanders had made up their minds early and lodged pre-poll votes, according to the Electoral Commission of Queensland.
Whether this was a sign that Queenslanders were unusually engaged with the election, or whether they just wanted it out of the way, was as opaque as whether the re-introduction of compulsory preferential voting for the first time since 1992 would produce a large informal vote.
The only certainty appeared to be that the election was tight, and no one quite knew what was about to happen.
Brisbane's only daily newspaper, the Courier-Mail, splashed its front-page with a giant headline screaming of Ms Palaszczuk "YOU DON'T DESERVE TO WIN".
This didn't sound promising for Labor, but the newspaper followed with a smaller qualifying strap concerning Liberal National Party Leader Tim Nicholls, which read: "but they reckon Nicholls won't".
The accompanying story related that a last-minute poll had found one in three Queensland voters didn't think Palaszczuk had done a good enough job to warrant holding power, but 44 per cent expected her to win. Only 28 per cent thought Nicholls would gain power.
Nicholls must have wondered what more could go wrong: as he turned up to vote in his Brisbane electorate of Clayfield, he was surrounded by shrill protesters decrying his support for the proposed giant Adani coal mine.
Newspoll, however, produced a paradox that gave Nicholls and the LNP hope.
The poll, published in The Australian, found Labor was ahead of the LNP, 52.5-47.5 on the two-party preferred scale. But in the next breath it predicted the most likely election result would be a new government led by the LNP with the support of Pauline Hanson's One Nation.
Out at the Sunshine Coast electorate of Buderim, Pauline Hanson herself was the centre of attention, as she has been throughout much of the campaign. She was supporting her party's Queensland leader, LNP defector Steve Dickson, who is given little chance of holding his seat.
Regardless, Hanson radiated confidence, telling everyone her party would surprise everyone.
There was already a surprise underway in Hanson's old city, Ipswich, where SportsBet was reporting One Nation's Malcolm Roberts, the former dual citizen senator, was attracting more money than any other candidate, despite being rated an outsider.
Though One Nation appears unlikely to win more than a handful of seats, the unpredictable flow of its voters' preferences will likely decide who will govern Queensland once the counting is done.
And because One Nation voters, scornful of the major political parties and their candidates, tend to ignore "how to vote" cards, the counting could continue beyond the weekend.
Meanwhile, out at the Gabba ...
