by Steven Lynch at Melbourne
Thursday, December 26, 2002

All roads in Melbourne lead to the MCG on Boxing Day. Hardly anyone's working, so all that traffic had to be going somewhere. And, even two hours before the start, the roads were congested and Yarra Park, which more or less surrounds the ground, was clocking up car-parkers at an impressive rate at $A6 a throw.

The ground itself is a strange sight, with a huge chunk missing to the right of the pavilion. A huge new stand - a big brother for the already vast Great Southern - is being constructed in time for the Commonwealth Games in 2006 (a neat 50 years after the Olympics were held here).

The loss of the staid old Ponsford Stand meant a late Christmas present for lazy locals. Normally Test cricket in Australia isn't televised in the host city until tea-time, unless the match is sold out. The MCG is so huge - normal capacity 100,000-plus - that that has never happened here before. (Bizarrely, the highest crowd figure recorded at the ground was around 145,000 for a Billy Graham crusade in 1959.) But the building work has brought the capacity down to around 75,000, and ticket sales were close enough to that level to persuade the ACB to allow TV transmission locally from 12 noon.

Meanwhile the Melbourne Cricket Club's members are on borrowed time. They've already lost their plush dining room, and next year the pavilion itself will have gone. But, as always, they turned out in force. Late-comers couldn't get near the comfy couches in the Long Room, and were banished to the draughty upper reaches of the Olympic Stand, another destined for an appointment with the demolition ball before long.

A sizeable number of members beat the jams by throwing off those Xmas excesses and turning up at 7.30 for a special breakfast (no alcohol at that time, surely) and a witty speech from Kerry O'Keeffe, the electric-heeled Test legspinner turned media pundit. O'Keeffe, who opened the batting in the 1976-77 Centenary Test after Bob Willis shattered Rick McCosker's jaw, was the last blond Australian legspinner before the one who's missing this Test with a dislocated shoulder.

The good news for everyone in the ground was that the weather was fine - sunny but not too hot. The Barmy Army, complete with the obligatory Santa or two, settled in near the old Bay 13. There's an Australian mantra, drummed into every schoolkid, of "Slip Slop Slap". It's aimed at cutting down sunburn - slip on a shirt, slop on some sunscreen, slap on a hat. The Barmies have adapted it slightly ... no prizes for guessing what they slop, in impressive proportions. But the good news is that barmy beer doesn't seem to lead to barmy behaviour (or only rarely). It just lubricates the vocal chords.

They didn't have too much to cheer in the first session, though, as Matthew Hayden and Justin Langer went into their own version of the MCG demolition job.

Steven Lynch is editor of Wisden.com.

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