Strange days at the MCG
Spending Grand Final day at Yarra Park, reminiscing on the year that was, I find myself overcome by a sublime melancholy
It was the night of July 3 and I was standing outside Gate 6 of the MCG for a Fremantle Dockers home game – in Melbourne. The exterior of the building was awash in a sickening glow of purple. I felt like I was about to enter a bordello. “Welcome to Freo at the ‘G” proclaimed the screens above the gate. I stood staring at this extraordinary phrase, gawking, mouth hung slack.
I looked around me to see if anyone else was as taken aback as I was. The concourse was deserted; the only ones who’d bothered to show up were the police, and that was probably because they were getting paid. I watched a pair of cops stroll by, laughing madly. They were right – it was all a sick joke. When a young supporter eventually appeared, trudging up the steps, flicking his Carlton scarf around his neck and rolling himself a cigarette, I saw one of the officers approach him. The maskless youth looked nervous, patting his pockets desperately, his cigarette trembling from its perch between his lips. I expected a strong reprimand from our usually austere protectors. Instead, the officer stuck out a hand and offered him a light.
That no one in or around the MCG that night really cared about the game gave the whole affair a kind of levity. From my perch three rows from the fence, the evening evaporated away, without friction and without substance. I scarcely took note of the scoreboard, and the spectators, all 12103 of them, were as aloof as I, chattering away, sipping their thermosfuls of hot chocolate, eyes averted from the action. Or, I should say, most of the spectators – because, sitting in front of me, arms crossed, was the exception. She was diehard Blues, 80 or so years old, and you could tell that she was the sort of old lady whose dual existence is neatly cleaved between time spent at home and time spent watching football. The sort of old lady who comes to the MCG every week, who has come here every week since she was eight, and who will keep coming here every week until she kicks the bucket – and even then, she’ll probably contrive her will so that her kids have to keep going on her behalf, and, most importantly, that they have to bring her ashes with them.
I’m talking here about the sort of old lady for whom football isn’t just a pastime, but the pastime, the full stop which allows one week to end and another to begin. Religious devotion isn’t strong enough an expression of what football means to ladies like her. I should know – my nan’s one of them.
“He’s improved, he’s showing why he was the third pick,” she says of Jack Martin, the maligned Blues recruit who she lovingly calls “Jacky” and whose entire playing history she surely knows by heart. Later, when the crowd inexplicably starts booing Nat Fyfe, she gazes around, then says mournfully: “Why do they have to boo good players?” And when the umpire thuds the ball into the middle of the ground, and it soars magnificently over the ruckmen, she slaps her hands together. “Good bounce,” she exclaims, because for her, the triumph of football is the triumph of all humankind.
Who was she talking to? No one in particular. Sometimes to the person next to her, sometimes to herself, sometimes to the players, to the boundary runners, to the umpires. But she clearly felt no need to address herself to anyone specific: after all, she was speaking a universal language.
Hers was the sole stabilising presence that entire night. Sitting in the glacial air, I could only shudder at the strangeness of it all. Ads for W.A. entities like “Dale Alcock Homes” and “City Index” and “RAC” and the image of the flag of Western Australia waving peremptorily across the LED banners all made me utterly confused. As I walked to the food stalls, I saw a succession of yobbos the likes of which you rarely encounter at the footy – sullen and bored, exuding a drunkenness that had no appropriate outlet, given the game meant nothing. I had to buy two packets of hot chips just to dampen my anguish. But maybe I should have expected it; after all, it was Freo v. Carlton, and 7 degrees, and Saturday, and July, and 2021.
You’ll perhaps be unsurprised to hear that, as I exited the ground that night, I thought I’d reached the peak of something. Peak disassociation, peak confusion, the peak of the bizarro world I increasingly inhabited. Then Grand Final week rolled around, and I realised, with an unmistakable degree of despondency, that I was wrong. What I had been lamenting wasn’t a broad incoherence, but rather the derisible state of the MCG. And what I hadn’t realised was that the lamenting had only just begun.
Riding around Melbourne last week, I occasionally saw the outward signs of Grand Final mania: the scarves hung on porches, the painted fences, the shopfronts. A house on Middlefield Drive in Blackburn North featured a tapestry of Bulldogs flags and posters in the windows, glowing with passion during the day and utterly invisible at night. “HONK IF YOU’RE GAWNY” proclaimed the red scrawl on a fence on Riversdale Road, although lacking the obligatory hackneyed depiction of the Demons captain to accompany it. On a trip down Swan Street, I noticed minor attempts at revivifying that certain intangible aura – perhaps best described as the “footy spirit” – which usually flows through the street like blood through a vein. Mounted scarves, pithy banners, decorated shop windows. At the intersection of Swan and Church I saw an old off-white Volvo whose bonnet, side windows and rear window were all decked out in Melbourne decal.
But usually, Grand Final week in Melbourne comprises more than empty aesthetics. It seems to encompass every inch of the town, from the narrowest laneway to the grandest garden. After all, football is about intangibles – which is why it’s so hard to tip winners. There is a spiritual dimension to football which is an inseparable part of its allure, somewhat like an airborne disease which, when caught, is impossible to disable.
Anyone who knows the least thing about me knows that I am deeply, deeply sick with this disease. It’s why the only TV show I watch with any degree of regularity, besides Sex and the City and Real Housewives, is AFL 360. It’s why I go to games like Fremantle versus Carlton on freezing nights in early July. And it’s why I decided to spend Grand Final day sitting outside the MCG, watching the crowds come and go, feeling the atmosphere of Yarra Park billow and flutter.
That the majority of park-goers that day were Demons supporters will surprise no one – Yarra Park is the inner-east, after all. Rolling past Punt Road Oval, a sea of Demon fans opened up before me. Glasses of wine were being shared beneath the Morton Bay fig trees. Groups of neighbours and families flung their red and blue scarves aside and had a kick of the footy. Others drew blankets on the grass, or walked around the ground, passing from the sun-swept northern side of the stadium to the shaded and clammy southern concourse overlooking the train tracks.
The statues encircling the ground told much of the story. While Dick Reynolds sold candy to no one outside Gate 6, those in Demon red huddled on the northern end around the statue of Demons legend Jim Stynes, tapping it warmly for luck, a scarf draped around Stynes’s neck. (Ron Barassi and Norm Smith had their scarves, too.) When I strolled beneath the effigy of Stynes, I smiled, and felt such profound cheer around the place that I momentarily forgot all about the world outside Yarra Park. These 10 acres, donated by lieutenant-governor Charles La Trobe to the Melbourne Cricket Club in 1853, seemed the beginning and the end of everything. I remember briefly checking the news as I sat outside Gate 3, and reading about curfews and masks and Peter Dutton, and thinking to myself that none of it mattered, that none of it could triumph over the majesty of this colossal structure and the great gatherings it draws forth.
I decided to turn on 3AW and listen to their match-day coverage. Because there were still six hours until the first bounce, the programme consisted of a succession of nostalgic diatribes from footy-starved callers, barely if at all related to the game forthcoming. A 66-year-old woman named Robin called in. She described the way football had infiltrated every aspect of her life since she was six years old. “We’re football through and through,” she said warmly, ruing the absence of the game from her beloved MCG. The panel thanked her for her call. Then the music began – Mike Brady, always Mike Brady. “There isn’t any doubting we’ll be in there shouting,” he sung. “Football’s such a part of this old town…”
As I basked in the extra-terrestrial glow of the southern sun outside Gate 3, a man approached me. He was sporting a fisherman’s hat with “GEELONG” printed in gold across it, and a worn leather satchel slung over his shoulder. His aura was so mannered and antiquated that I imagined him stepping off the Orient Express. He pointed at my scarf, partly concealed: “Hawks or Tigers?” “Tigers, of course,” I said. Then he reached into the satchel and offered something out to me. It was an old coin. AUSTRALIA, PENNY, 1951, a carved-out kangaroo in faded bronze. “Put it on the Tigers next year,” he said. My heart ballooned.
When a sudden cool change swept in at precisely 2:35 p.m., the exact time when, in a normal year, the Grand Final would have started, I had to ask myself: was this coincidence, was I still in the bizarro world, or was this the enactment of some sort of unnameable divine logic? I soon dismissed the question, because it didn’t matter: nobody was going anywhere. The Sherrins still floated in the spring air, the picnickers remained steadfastly cheery, Dick Reynolds kept his arm outstretched. And beneath the soft sheets of drizzle drifting slowly down onto the grass, I was reminded of Yarra Park’s diffident beauty.
Throughout the week I’d often forgotten about the game, its grandeur and weight; then, after gazing upon the MCG for an hour or so, I finally recalled the immensity of it all, and I felt butterflies in my stomach. I can’t remember the last Grand Final day on which I didn’t feel nervous in some way. Now it was nearly 3 o’clock, and I was able to suddenly zoom out and see the broader picture. Although I felt connected to all of these people who had been drawn, on this most exultant of Australian days, to the spectral presence of the MCG, I couldn’t help but think of all it could have been. Smelling the hot chips, hearing the murmuring crowd anticipating the first bounce, seeing the life-long MCC members donning their best blazers, feeling the rapture of ecstasy which sport alone brings. It was this which truly left me speechless.
Friends had arrived, and we’d been hanging out for an hour or so when, all of a sudden, I felt it was time to go. So I took one last lap around the ground. The crowds had scarcely dispersed. “Carn the Dees!” I heard, groups of hopeful supporters embracing, holding drinks aloft, then breaking out extemporaneously into the Grand Old Flag. A family sat beneath the enormous Olympiad plaque, sharing sandwiches. The scarf-toting statue of Norm Smith kept a watchful eye over the reams of football lovers who’d descended upon the park. All held firm, all felt true, and I only wished it wasn’t all so fruitless.
Outside Gate 1, I saw the coin man again. Even he’d stayed around, handing out his gifts indiscriminately to anyone who walked by, young or old, Demon or Tiger. As I rode past him, we nodded at each other, and I smiled, and I don’t know if he smiled back, but I want to believe he did. And in that moment I thought of the old lady who I saw that night in July, and wondered where she was on this cool September afternoon. I wondered what she’d make of the forsaken MCG, a solemn sculpture left so desolate, the empty stands visible beyond unmanned gates, the calls of the crowd surrounding it echoing in the empty air. Football’s such a part of this old town…
But then, she’d probably make of it exactly what I did. For I am like that old lady, whose triumphs sit squarely on 10 acres in East Melbourne.
Love this work mate. Certainly captured all the emotions of a normal grand final day at the G. Keep it up!