A POWER outage has delayed the start of Thursday night's AAMI Community Series contest between Sydney and Brisbane in scenes eerily reminiscent of the Lions' match against Melbourne at the Gabba last year.

Players from both teams had completed their warm-ups and with just minutes before the scheduled opening bounce at 7.10pm AEDT, all the floodlights surrounding Blacktown International Sportspark went out.

Players immediately retreated to their respective dressing rooms while they waited for the power to return, while officials from both clubs looked bemusedly skyward.

The lights eventually came back on and play got underway at 7.40pm AEDT, 30 minutes behind schedule.

SWANS v LIONS Full match coverage and stats

Incredibly, it's the second time in less than 12 months that the Lions have had a game delayed by a power outage.

In round two of the premiership season last year, the Lions' match against Melbourne was halted by 40 minutes when the lights at the Gabba went out in the final quarter.

The light failure wasn't the only bit of drama before Thursday night's game, with a baby red-bellied black snake needing to be removed from the playing surface by a snake catcher.

Thankfully, the players weren't on the field at the time.

It's not the first time there has been a snake invader at the venue; September's AFLW contest between Richmond and GWS was similarly delayed so that a red-bellied black snake could be removed from the field.

Ironically, floodlights weren't initially expected to be required for the Swans-Lions game. On Monday, the match start was pushed back three hours from its original timeslot of 4.10pm AEDT due to the predicted extreme heat.

The temperature in Blacktown soared to 40 degrees on Thursday and was still at 34 degrees when the match was due to start at 7.10pm AEDT.