Grandstand
The Age
Monday January 26, 2004
A Fijian 11 and a Victorian 18, the Pope and Billy Graham and a footballer the people called God ? the Woiworung camping ground that we know as the MCG has hosted some glorious spectacles over the past century-and-a-half. By Brian Matthews
JONI SIQILA TOOK THE NEW ball and went through his preparatory ritual, which involved laying out strings of coconut shells and other items at the top of his run-up, before tearing in and hitting the pitch hard, though not necessarily with great accuracy.
The Victorian opening batsmen, Vaughan and Healy, pleasantly surprised at opposition skipper Prince Kadavu's inexplicable decision to send them in on a plumb pitch after winning the toss, started aggressively.
At 0/21, Vaughan drove powerfully through mid-on where a fieldsman stopped a certain boundary with his shin. Long before sound-effects microphones, the crack of ball on bone resounded like a gunshot across the ground and the 9,000 spectators flinched and gasped until they saw that the fieldsman, Meleti, was undeterred. Just how undeterred would emerge an over or two later when he held a stunning, diving catch at cover point.
So one of the MCG's more exotic events unfolded on January 25, 1908, when the Fijian 11 took on a mostly Victorian side and announced themselves "greatly pleased" with the occasion and the Melbourne Cricket Ground.
It was not the first time that large crowds had turned up at the MCG. When H. H.
Stephenson's team of English cricket professionals arrived in Melbourne on Christmas Eve, 1861, they began days of being scrutinised, and celebrated before walking on to the 'G on New Year's Day, 1862, for the first ever England-Australia cricket match. Well, not quite a match - 11 Englishmen played 18 Victorians, but it could have been worse. The original plan was for a Victorian 22! Over the four days of the game, 45,000 people attended. Barely eight years old, the MCG was already showing that mysterious capacity for being, in the words of The Age journalist Steve Waldon, "a place where great events uncover greater deeds", and where Melburnians flocked in ever greater numbers, excited, partisan, rabid, or just plain curious.
Over the years, everybody came to the 'G, including God, who was confidently assumed to be a sponsor by both Billy Graham, on March 15, 1959, and Pope John Paul ll, on November 27, 1986. Graham attracted, in the words of MCC Secretary Ian Johnson, the biggest crowd ever to fill a cricket stadium - 130,000, outscoring the Pope by about 30,000.
Concluding his historic visit, Graham said, "I feel very humble. I feel I am just a spectator.
I didn't do it. It was the Lord's doing and I am only his messenger," his version of the time-honoured formula that runs: "It was a great team effort and not only a win for us.
Footy/cricket/God was the winner here today/tonight/this arvo."
People go to great lengths to get into the MCG. They will pay huge sums to scalpers for tickets on Grand Final day or arrive days before the game and camp in Yarra Park to conquer the queues, or announce loudly in the packed Cricketers Arms that they need a bloody ticket because this year the Pies are going to do it.
With standing-room tickets for every day but one of the 1956 Olympic Games, I recorded my own little footnote in the narrative of the desperate on the day of John Landy's metric mile.
Ticketless, we discovered that there was a short section of the outer wall of the MCG made of sturdy, very high cyclone wire.
The 'G had been a centre of controversy before the Games and preparations began late and were hectic. This little window onto its inner workings was undoubtedly left over from that flurry of last-minute activities. We were two minds with but a single thought. My mate and I sprinted at the fence and clawed up and over. I landed hard and twisted my ankle."
I might have to scratch from the 1500," I said, limping."
Well, Landy'll be relieved."
And so we were in, walking away from a small knot of amazed onlookers, as if dropping painfully from the sky to fall sprawling into the 'G was the standard method of entry.
But so much that is alien to the "normal" world is somehow possible at the 'G, from great feats of athleticism and skill to simple, last-ditch determination to get in.
Like a great work of art, the 'G has lived on through the ages since governor La Trobe granted the Melbourne Cricket Club permission to establish a cricket ground in Yarra Park where the tribes of the Kulin Nation had once gathered. Like all great buildings that become landmarks and symbols of a city, the 'G carries its history and the ghosts of its former self into another age and, like them, combines past and present into a timeless, always comforting, always welcoming shape. .
Brian Matthews is the author of The Temple Down The Road: the life and times of the MCG, published by Viking, 2003.
For a program of events celebrating the MCG's anniversary, see pages 16-17.
© 2004 The Age