What is there to do at Melbourne Cricket Ground?
The Melbourne Cricket Ground — always the MCG, never by its full name in any conversation that intends to be taken seriously — was first played on in 1853, making it the oldest major sporting venue in continuous use in the world outside of a handful of British and European grounds. The site was granted to the Melbourne Cricket Club (MCC) by the colonial government, and the MCC has managed it ever since — a private club administering a public cultural institution, a Victorian arrangement that has somehow persisted through nearly 170 years of Australian democracy.
The ground hosted the 1956 Melbourne Summer Olympics, the first Olympic Games held in the Southern Hemisphere, using a temporary athletics track laid over the outfield. The Olympic Stand, completed for the Games, remains one of the five main stands. The stadium was progressively redeveloped from the 1990s through 2006, reaching its current capacity of 100,024 — the largest stadium in Australia and the largest in the world dedicated to cricket, which still holds the record for the most sustained all-round use of a single sporting surface: the same oval turf serves AFL football from late summer through winter and then Test cricket through the summer months.
The Boxing Day Test Match (26 December to 30 December) is the MCG's most celebrated annual fixture — a summer cricket Test between Australia and visiting nations played to crowds that regularly exceed 70,000 per day and 350,000 across the match. The ritual of attending the Boxing Day Test on the 26th, often with a crowd exceeding 90,000, is one of Melbourne's defining cultural traditions, combining post-Christmas heat, outdoor beer gardens, and the specific pleasure of watching five days of cricket in a stadium built for 100,000 people who are all there because they want to be.