Lions Letter: The 'G will convert non-believers into devoted fans on Saturday

The iconic Melbourne Cricket Ground will host the Lions' second test against Australia.

AINT NOTHING BUT A G THING: The British and Irish Lions arrive for the Captain's Run at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in Melbourne, Australia. Pic: David Davies/PA Wire.

The trams on the way out from Flinders Street Station were busy on Thursday evening as fans from Hawthorn and Carlton made their regular pilgrimage to the Melbourne Cricket Ground for their weekly dose of the AFL.

We know it as Aussie Rules and to supporters of this city’s nine professional AFL teams in this sports-mad city, their destination is simply “The ‘G”. 

As a kid growing up in 1970s and 80s England, where the football season morphed into cricket every May, the biennial glimpse of an Ashes tour Down Under focused on the MCG and the Boxing Day Test was a beacon of summer warmth amid the Christmas festivities, though for English sides going into the lion’s den they rarely emerged unscathed.

This was the ground where the late, great Shane Warne, that most mercurial and talented of Australian spin bowlers bowled the first Ashes hat-trick in 91 years when he skittled out the English tail-end on Boxing Day 1994 as the visitors crumbled to 92 all out to lose the match by a whopping 295 runs.

The English journalists among the visiting media being shown around the 100,024-seat stadium on a rain and windswept Tuesday lunchtime were reminded of that fact during a fascinating tour in the company of former Australian cricketer Damien Fleming.

Fleming, who was in that Aussie bowling attack that day 31 years ago, also pointed to the only seat in the MCG’s vast stands that was coloured red, to mark the longest-hit six at the stadium, way up on the second tier.

It invited an innocent question from an Irish rugby journalist of “what’s a six?”. All of which goes to prove that cricket remains a mystery to many, and that tales from "The 'G" are still to be learned from those not steeped in the games to have been played here.

Mack Hansen plays hurling during the British & Irish Lions squad captain's run at the MCG in Melbourne, Australia. Photo by Brendan Moran/Sportsfile

Rugby union takes another tentative step into the MCG on Saturday night, when the British & Irish Lons break new ground against Australia in the second Test of this 2025 series. A crowd of 95,000-plus is expected at this iconic venue and centrepiece of the 1956 Olympics and Wallabies skipper Harry Wilson is eagerly anticipating running onto the hallowed oval.

“It's super special. For Australian sport, there's no bigger stadium,” Wilson said.

“You grow up here watching Boxing Day tests, the AFL Grand Finals all here. It's always sold out, packed. It doesn't get much better than that, so I guess the feeling of probably running out here in front of 90 plus thousand people is truly special.”

It is also a stadium where the great Jim Stynes, the AFL’s finest import from Ireland, has been cast in a bronze statue on the plaza surrounding it in tribute to his feats with the Melbourne “Demons” Football Club.

All this was new to John Fogarty on Friday as the Lions wrapped up their captain’s run training session at the MCG. The Ireland and Lions scrum coach is a recent convert to the MCG’s iconic status.

“I didn’t know what the MCG was, I have never watched cricket, never seen the game, we didn’t play it when we were kids so I hadn’t got a clue,” Fogarty admitted.

“Andy (Farrell) has been telling us: ‘Wait until you see this’. When he got back from doing a recce he was ‘oh my God, this stadium, that stadium’ but nothing landed until we walked out.

“My brother Denis is over and he came to the (AFL) game last night and was telling me it was going to be some stadium to play in, it is an amazing place.

“I remember the first time I walked out to Croke Park when I was a kid and I was ‘oh God, look at this’ so when we walked out you could see a lot of us looking around and going ‘Jesus, this is bigger than anything we have been in before’.

“Certainly for me it is bigger than anything I have been in before, it is an unbelievable privilege to be here, I know have said it a couple of times, but I mean it. I feel unbelievably lucky, and the players are the same, to be able to do this stuff. It is not normal.”

Whether the Lions win or lose on Saturday morning, you can be sure the MCG will have converted a few more non-believers into devoted fans of this magnificent sporting cathedral.