Boxing Day

We decided to sleep in because we thought that the match didn’t start until 11am and the hotel breakfast was available until 9am. We only just made it to breakfast by 9am.

At breakfast, we overheard people talking about the match starting at 10:30 or even 10:20. When we went back up our room, we checked the tickets to find that it did start at 10:30.

The Ground was only a block away and so it only took 5 minutes to get there but it took another ten minutes to get through the crowds around to the gate for our seats. We reached out seats just in time for the national anthems.

Our seats were great – almost end on to the wicket on the southern side – opposite the members stand. However, there was one obstacle that we couldn’t predict: the man in front of Steph was particularly tall and she had trouble seeing around him. She certainly couldn’t have seen over him. It was rather like sitting in a theatre behind a lady with a large hat except at the theatre you could ask the lady to take off her hat if you were game but if I’d said something similar to this chap about his head being in the way, I think I would have lost my head. After the first drinks break, Steph and I swapped places.

In my new seat, I noticed that man two seats from me in the same row was a former Labor senator. After a few minutes, I remembered his name (Robert Ray). There he was: larger than life (literally).

The Boxing Day test has a central place in the sporting calendar in Australia. I’d wanted to go to such a match for decades and this was the day I fulfilled that dream. The Boxing Day test on Boxing Day at the MCG. And I wasn’t disappointed - it was a great day of cricket fought out between two evenly matched teams. One of the highlights was to see Matthew Hayden score a century.

The MCG is better organized than the SCG. The scoreboard was better, the food and drink outlets were better and the crowd logistics was better. Perhaps it was typical Melbourne – the attendants even wore suits and ties rather than the T-shirts you see in Sydney.

There were two streakers late in the day – both male – one naked and one wearing shorts. The security guards don’t muck around when they tackle the ground invaders. For the second bloke, they tackled him around the neck and tumbled him over several times. After that, I thought they would have taken him off in an ambulance but he did manage to walk off – with both arms firmly twisted behind his back courtesy of the security guards.

The match finished at about 6pm and we were back in our hotel soon afterwards.

Before we’d left on our holiday, Suzy had contacted Helen and Don who used to live across the road from us in Elva Avenue but had moved back to Melbourne about 14 years ago. Unfortunately, Don was tied up because he left today on his yacht as part of the Melbourne to Hobart race. So only Helen was available to meet us.



See picked up the three of us from our hotel at 7pm and took us to an Italian restaurant in Lygon Street for a great meal. A great opportunity to catch up.