Me and my colleagues from the soccer store managed to get hold of some free tickets for the final game of the Socceroos qualifying campaign at the MCG last night. The MCG is an amazing stadium, it holds over 100,000 people when full. Last nights attendance was just shy at nearly 70,000 but it still made for an amazing atmosphere. The only annoyance was that Australia have already qualified, as have Japan, so they both decided to field reserve teams. The football was atrocious, absolutely appalling, I was actually surprised at how bad they were. But luckily for me the MCG crowd supplied me with 90 minutes worth of entertainment to make up for the shocking match.
In Australia drinking is allowed at sports venues. You can go to the MCG buy a pint and sit back and enjoy the match with a beer. I think this is a splendid idea and it also gets the fans going. About 10 minutes into the game a man about 10 seats away from me produced a trumpet from under his coat and started playing a few anthems. This was soon stopped by the stewards and they started to escort the gentleman out of the ground. Within moments there were boo’s targeting the stewards and the crowd started chanting “Let him play, Let him play”. The stewards at this point let the man play one last song to which he received a standing ovation then the stewards ejected him from the ground. That was the start of the crowd vs steward war. People started to collect plastic cups from their empty beers and stack them into “snakes”. The snakes would then get passed along a row and everybody would add their empty cups to the bottom. The stewards yet again tried to get involved but they couldn’t keep up with the crowd and the snakes started to reach tremendous lengths. The crowd then started singing “You can’t stop the snake, you can’t stop the snake” to the tune of "We are top of the league".
With about 5 minutes to go the MCG crowd secured a worthy victory against their oppressors. A big bald security guard had a young girl by the arm and was dragging her out of the stand when someone started singing “Is she really going out with him” by Joe Jackson and soon everyone was joining in. The match finished, MCG Crowd 3 - Stewards 0.
