Melbourne Cricket Ground, Stadium in Yarra Park, East Melbourne, Australia
The Melbourne Cricket Ground is a large oval stadium in Yarra Park, East Melbourne. Its playing field is striped in alternating light and dark green, with a central cricket pitch and white boundary lines. Tiered seating in green and grey rings the field, and two tall white lattice floodlight towers rise above the roofline. A curved concrete and glass outer structure with vertical mullions encloses the stands.
Built in the mid-nineteenth century, the ground served as the main cricket venue for the colony and later hosted the first Test match between Australia and England in the eighteen seventies. Over the following decades, it became the home of Australian rules football's grand final and the center stage for the Summer Olympics in the mid-twentieth century.
The ground sits on a Wurundjeri camping ground and corroboree site, and the Melbourne Cricket Club, founded in November 1838, has managed it since 1853. Its nickname, the 'G, is used across Australia. The Australian Sports Museum is housed inside the stadium, and the ground is listed on both the Victorian Heritage Register and the Australian National Heritage List.
Guided tours run throughout the week and offer access to areas normally closed to the public, including locker rooms and the playing surface. Visitors who come on non-match days will find the site quieter and have more time to explore the museum displays without the rush of event crowds.
The MCG's record attendance of 130,000 came not from sport but from a 1959 Billy Graham evangelistic crusade; the sporting record is 121,696 at the 1970 VFL Grand Final between Carlton and Collingwood. The ground has used drop-in pitches since 1996, and a Sheffield Shield match in December 2019 was abandoned because the pitch was judged unsafe.
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