The G at the end of the line

One day, I walked out of the MCG and when I looked up, there was a superhero in front of me. It was my first time using that gate in ages. I had moved to the other side of town, so I usually did not need it. I stumbled onto the statue of Keith Miller. This huge metal man bounding down into the crease. The sculptor is trying to do the best with his perfect Brylcreemed hair. Of all the heroes, perhaps none deserved the statue more than him. He played at the ground in Australian rules football for St Kilda, for Victoria in the days Shield crowds were huge, and then Tests for Australia.  

He was a three-time MCG star. He was a legend.

When Miller died, I was working in the city, and his funeral was around the corner. I darted out of the office, and ran down there. But when I arrived, I felt weird, like I had not done enough to even go in and pay my respects. So, I sat on the steps instead.

His statue kind of looms down at you. The brass and height make him stand out, and if you position yourself in the right spot, it’s like you’re facing up and he’s about to dismiss you. He is huge and intimidating. Yet, it almost never feels this way. As big as his statue is, it’s nothing more than a fleck around the MCG. This is a ground so massive that even the stars feel small.

The MCG puts everything in the shade. I lived almost 20 kilometres away, and I felt like I lived in the shadow of the G.

The Epping line was the train from the northern suburbs to the centre of Melbourne. When it started in 1889, it was a country town. Only eight years earlier, local boy Ned Kelly had been terrorising people there with his Bushranger gang. However, these days it’s a suburb of little to no interest to those who didn't happen to live there. A mention of it is usually met with, "Where's that?" The line was built originally because locals wanted the city's sewage for their farms. Instead, the treatment plant went out to Werribee; Epping wasn't good enough for Melbourne's shit.

Even the first station building was a second-hand import from somewhere else unmemorable: Epping couldn't even get an original awful-looking building. The next station building had all the charm of a shoebox. It was an ugly, hot and depressing station. The trains were often not air-conditioned. They had the requisite tags from wannabe graffiti stars, very few with any artistic merit. Chewing gum helped give the seats more padding. And perhaps most awfully, the trains stopped at every single station, every single time. Plus, abnormally long delays at Keon Park and just before Clifton Hill.

But to many of us who lived out there, the train line was the best thing about being from Epping. This train took us straight from our end-of-the-world suburbs to the MCG. So to us, it was the most special place in Epping.

On the entire line, there is little inspiring architecture or stunning vistas: It's largely overcrowded roads, suburban back fences, junkies, and the special Merri Creek. There are 20 stops before the city on the 21.2km journey. Many of them are other suburbs or inner city stations that aren’t used much because Melbourne has trams.

But there are little bits of sport, like all the many grounds at Donath Reserve.

Then you head past Preston City Oval, where the Bullants play footy and cricket. A small stadium that fits 5000 people to watch semi-professional footballers.

Then there are sights of familiar light towers and a famous stadium. But it isn’t the main ground; it’s Victoria Park, where my football team, Collingwood, used to play. Mostly, it was a wretched hive of scum and villainy. It also once held 47000 people, but it was usually around 28000.

From Victoria Park not many people get on. By the time you get to West Richmond, it is rare to see anyone get on there. On match days, the train is bursting with green and gold for the cricket or the colours of the two football clubs. But no one gets off, because it’s the next station everyone wants.

The train is built into a dip, but there are glimpses of a light tower that just can’t be anything else. But then you can’t see much again until you arrive at the station. For 84 years, it was called Jolimont. That was a French phrase that meant 'pretty mount', and it was the name of the surrounding area. But the station is quite low itself. This means that the main attraction for people to get off is kind of hidden.

Eventually, they updated the name to Jolimont - MCG; probably to make sure tourists didn’t get lost. Essentially, the new name means pretty mount Melbourne Cricket Ground.

It is the only thing at the station that lets you know where you are.

For most of the year, it’s not a platform that needs to be used. So it was fine to keep shabby, which meant it had a couple of old awnings that could barely keep 12 people dry—giving it a certain charm. That old world feel isn’t as nice when you realise the toilets aren't always open, and that most of the time the rats outnumber the people.

You’re just short of the town centre, and the Hilton Hotel is the biggest building. But the thing you’re getting here to see is hidden. People line up to get out of the station on match days, and first-time fans often get bumped into because they’re looking through the leaves already.

The trees try to cover it, but there just isn‘t a thing large enough to cover something as big as the MCG.

You walk up, either on the road, or just over the grass of Yarra Park (which is, on this day, and many like it, a quickly filling car park).

It’s a sacred spot for sporting fans, but it was also before. Prior to it becoming the MCG or Richmond Paddocks, it was home of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people before colonisation.

As a sporting venue, it’s had the same transformation—from a place where people naturally gathered at for sport to an artificial one. As it did, it grew to an unnatural size, grass is still at its heart, but it’s wrapped thick concrete and throbbing steel.

You will know your side of the ground beforehand; otherwise the trek around it will take longer than a Test match. The size is incredible. It’s not until you are at the base of it, or end up accidentally walking around that you realise how big it is.

Lining up to enter, for the first time, people always look straight up at a be under a light tower; it seems so high that it might tickle the overcast sky.

You won't see many blades of grass at this point; you're still in the outer ring. Everything is concrete. Then you'll go past the beer queues and be offered a hot pie by a seat-to-seat seller until you're at Melbourne's best walkway.

Well, maybe second-best, as there is a pretty good one on the way to the ground too.

But the one inside is pretty magical. If for no other reason that you finally actually see the ground.

A walkway that allows you to wander around the thing you came to stare at. That magical sandy grass.

You are there, right in front of it. I have been to that ground hundreds of times, and it stills my mind every time.

Melbourne can be unremarkable at first glance. There are no amazing bridges for tourists to look at. No legendary giant rocks to clamber over. And no tropical coral reefs to float around. You don't get a tan in Melbourne. Godzilla and other Kaiju don't stomp up Port Philip Bay in their films, they do it in Sydney Harbour, because that is the famous image of Australia. Melbourne's biggest tourist attractions are clocks out the front of a train station, graffiti walls in the back laneways, and a dirty river. It's just a city made up of many different kinds of villages that are great to live in.

With one special attraction. A sporting ground. The Melbourne Cricket Ground. The MCG. The G.

The first Test venue. A stadium that has had the Queen, the Pope, Michael Jackson, and an Olympic. Athletes like Betty Cuthbert, Ron McKeown and Sachin Tendulkar all out on it. A stadium that had 130,000 Pentecostal preacher (probably, possibly) patrons in it. The stadium that found 121,696 fans watching Carlton run away with the AFL grand final after Peter McKenna was knocked out by one of his own players.

Where Mitchell Starc almost blew the entire thing down when he took Brendon McCullum in the first over of the World Cup final. Where they chanted Lillee, Lillee, Lillee. Where over 10% of the city's population would come for just one match. And more than three million times a year do the turnstiles click over.

It is Melbourne's gathering place. It is where Melbourne screams at the night. Barks at the day. Spends its wages. Barracks. Sledges. Cries. Laughs. Wins. Loses. And sometimes draws.

It is the place with light towers so high they can only be compensating for something. It builds legends. It's a sporting colosseum that is more than its concrete, more than its size, more than just Melbourne's.

In 2000 years, it will be the MCG that defines the Melbourne of now. Either in ruins, or as a 4D virtual reality construct.

I've been there when only a handful of people were there, waiting for the covers to come off for one of its oldest tenants, the Victoria cricket team, to continue a rain-affected Shield Match. And I've been there when there were almost 100,000 football fans calling the umpire "maggots" and singing campy World War I songs as their team beat the team from just down the road. It is special every time. It can make you breathless, with awe or a punch. It has its own feel. A Melbourne superiority and inferiority complex all rolled into one. It doesn't need you to know it's better than somewhere else, it knows it.

The first time I was there, the crowd called Gary Ablett, a man known as god, a "wanker". In fact, the opposition players can ask for no higher praise. Virat Kohli and Richard Hadlee have had the same. There is nothing like 50,000 chanting wanker in unison to honour a visiting legend.

The first time I saw the cricket, Mike Whitney stormed in to bowl left-arm fast, fell over and people laughed. I've seen players from Pakenham and Pakistan hit with flags. When it hates, it hates hard. When it parties, it parties hard.

The 2014 AFL grand final was another perfect day at the G with a massive crowd and half the country watching it on their TVs. Out on the ground was one of Australia's greatest athletes, Adam Goodes. He was booed. Goodes is an indigenous star, bred in Victoria, playing the local game and the current Australian of the Year. He has also won two AFL premierships and two Brownlows (best player that year). A few years earlier, Shane Warne had to walk onto the field with a helmet to stop a near-90,000 crowd piffing golf balls at English outfielders during an ODI. The G walks the line, and is not always on the right side.

The MCG of the previous generation was the one of the Bay 13. A massive open air bar that happened to have live sport going on beside it. People used to bring in giant styrofoam eskies full of beer, and drink until they were finished, even if stumps had been called. It was there that the MCG did callisthenics with Merv Hughes. It is the same place where most people are thrown out for drunken behaviour—sometimes, even before a ball is bowled.

During the 90s, the thing to do was smuggle alcohol into the ground (plastic fruit containers sticky taped to your inner thigh was our method to get bourbon in) because the previous generation had abused so many drinks the security and police could no longer handle it.

It wasn’t the only bad behaviour. People would bring in phone books all cut up to throw up in the air during the Mexican Wave era. The paper would stick to you, because there would be liquids thrown up too. You had to hope they were throwing warm stale beer, and not the same drink, having been through the urinary tract. But that was always the rumour.

It is easy to get romantic about it, but racism, sexism and homophobia spew into the East Richmond air as much as adulation and hero worship do. The famous Anzac game—perhaps the best event the MCG holds—would always have a minute’s silence spoiled by some dickhead yelling out for their team.

It's everything right about Australia one moment and everything wrong about it a heartbeat later.

They call it the people's ground. It's a catchy slogan that forgets the rights of the Victorian government, MCG Trust and Melbourne Cricket Club, but it's also startlingly true. You wouldn't call Lord's, with its possessive apostrophe, a people's ground. It is very much a place for their members, as they made clear with the Eton v Harrow fiasco. Eden Gardens is owned and run by the Indian Army. Narendra Modi’s ground is still in the prop stage.

The G is part of the people. It's made of grass, Merri Creek dirt, sand, concrete, metal and human barracking. If there were to be a revolution in Australia, the MCG would be involved. It’s not that other venues aren’t special; it’s that the MCG produces its own sounds that I have still never heard anywhere else. Maybe it is the screams rattling around the giant echo chamber, or the ghosts of games past. But it sounds different.

If the G likes you, you become a legend. It doesn't really matter if you are or not. You could be Dennis Lillee or Merv Hughes, Ricky Ponting or Dean Jones, once they throw their scream behind you, you're a legend.

These days you can't take beer bottles—or golf balls, I assume—into the ground anymore. If you managed to get one in, you'd probably be arrested and put into a bunker under the ground for life. Melbourne, and the G, has changed. It is now a city of rules and regulations. Everything must be family-friendly and sanitised. Walk in with a stroller, and you will be greeted with the full information on how to look after your small children. There is a museum for people waiting for a match, or one of world’s best sports libraries. The people swear less as they leave the ground, and they are often soundtracked by the sound of "Classical Gas" being played by a quality busker.

You can still get beer and pies, but the pies can be purchased gluten-free and the beer is mid-strength. The beef pies from my days with little actual meat and sometimes added fish bones have been replaced with spinach and cauliflower options. You can also get salt & pepper calamari, Thai pumpkin soup and Babuli Handi Vegetable Curry. This is because the MCG, at any one time, reflects society at large. Over the years, the seats have gotten bigger, Corporate suites are everywhere. There are MCC members and AFL members. There are fewer tickets sold at the people's ground despite the fact that Melbourne has almost tripled its population since the first time more than 100,000 people entered.

It has transformed from a place of games to a place of sports business. A sports marketing masterpiece.

But it is still the people's ground, their bucket, pulpit and canvas. It is the venue my grandfather climbed the fence of to see Don Bradman fail, the one my father worked in while Sobers made his double hundred and where I convinced a girlfriend to muck around with me in the top of the great southern stand. You don't have to be a sports fan to go to the G, you just have to be in Melbourne. Chances are, it will suck you in at least once. It's not part of Melbourne, it is Melbourne. Melbourne’s stunning concrete anus.

At the end of the match, the crowds spilled back into Melbourne, everyone zigzagged towards the Yarra Park, pubs, trams, footpaths into town, or Richmond station. That was a major station, busy all day line, and it was by far the most used train station to get to the ground.

Jolimont was an afterthought for most of the years, but at the end of the game. We had our family plan. My dad would tell me, "See the Hilton Hotel, if you ever get lost, walk to right of that. That's where Jolimont station is, that's our station". Our station. The people's station.

My dad was so proud to sign me up as an MCC member when I was a kid, so I could watch as much football and cricket as I wanted, and also improve my class position. But I had to let the membership go, as it’s been 17 years since I’ve used it.

Everything changes. Even where I am from is no longer the end of the list; the name changed from Epping Line to Mernda, as it’s now the last stop. If you get on at the new upgraded Epping station, it still heads to Jolimont, even if it no longer stops all stations.

I'm from Epping, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, and cricket. The Melbourne Cricket Ground is all of them.

We felt isolated when I was growing up. On the verge of a big city, but at the arse end of it. When I was young we didn’t even have a McDonald’s or a Shopping Centre. Our footy ground didn’t have a grandstand. We were in the middle of nowhere. And when we finally got on our train to the city, the 21.2 kilometre ride to the centre of Melbourne took an age because we had to stop at every single station. It felt like 2000 kilometres.

But the one thing that made us feel special was it felt like we direct line to the MCG. The people’s ground; our ground.

Parts of this story originally appeared on ESPNcricinfo