To the MCG for cricket, atmosphere, dreams, and maybe, rain

When is a cricket ground not a cricket ground? When it's the MCG. Despite what it says on the tin, the Melbourne Cricket Ground is no such thing. Cricket is played there, of course - and will be on Sunday when Pakistan meet England in the men's T20 World Cup final, weather permitting. But they will do so in a stadium, not at a ground. This is not semantics: the differences are vast. A ground offers reasons for it to be remembered. Galle's venerable fort brooding serenely, where kite festivals blossom above the cricket; Dunedin's soaring wooded hill and generous sprinkling of genially sloshed Scarfies, or Otago University students; the Brabourne's art deco delights and snobbish members; the beery brouhaha and braai smoke of Centurion's grass banks; the Oval's friendly stewards, knowledgeable crowd and sagging wedding cake of a pavilion; the sadly disused Bourda's shallow, muddy moat and deep, dark verandahs; the stink of empire, arrogance and over-priced champagne at Lord's. Newlands is a temple to the tired ordinariness of its flabbily affluent surrounding suburb that is transformed and bejewelled by Table Mountain hulking in the distance. But a stadium is a stadium is just another stadium. Like the MCG, the biggest of the breed in the southern hemisphere. Sometimes the stadium makers get it right. Like they did at Adelaide Oval, where the most recent redevelopment took away, for most spectators, the beloved view of St Peter's Anglican Cathedral but bequeathed a huddle of billowing stands that somehow are simultaneously vast and sheltering and easy on the eye. The hard hats also had the good sense not to close the gap at the Cathedral End, which gives the scene precious context - reassuringly, you can see the real world beyond. At the SCG, they dug up the Hill to build the Victor Trumper Stand and stopped just short of making a stadium by leaving intact and untouched the Members' and Ladies' pavilions. The sight of their almost avocado green roofs is the only way to know, if you turn on your television on a whim during a match, that the game is in Sydney. Place matters more in cricket than in all competitive sports with the possible exception of golf, which is less a sport than a game for people who don't like sport. What that says about cricketers, too many of whom play too much golf too often, is another matter. Maybe Jonny Bairstow and Josh Inglis have the time to explain this worrying tendency, considering they are out of cricket for a while because of injuries they suffered on the golf course. Similarly, the MCG is about other things more than it is about cricket. Famously, it has never been filled to capacity for a cricket match. The record crowd is the 143,750 who turned up to see evangelist Billy Graham in 1959. The closest that's come to being challenged was in 1970, when 121,696 were in attendance to watch Collingwood and Carlton contest what was then called the VFL - now the AFL - Grand Final. Keeping clear the large space needed to play a game of Aussie rules necessarily means precluding thousands witnessing a man on a podium punching a bible, allowing a greater multitude to be summoned. Maybe that's why AFL fans don't even reference cricket when they talk about the MCG. To them it's simply "the G". Even a friendly football match has attracted more people to the venue than a game of cricket, albeit that the teams were Manchester City and Real Madrid, who fetched a hoard of 99,382 in 2015. There's a compelling symmetry to the MCG being a bigger deal for Aussie rules than it is for cricket. What Australians call footy was, one version of history has it, dreamt up by Tom Wills, Victoria's star cricket captain who unveiled the game in 1858 as a means to keep his players fit between seasons. But, as early as 1841, colonists wrote of encountering indigenous people playing Marn Grook, which has strong similarities to footy and may have inspired Wills. But there was no chance Marn Grook would catch on in the starkly binary world of sport in the Victorian age, and even less so now. According to Wikipedia, "A winner could only be declared if one of the sides agreed that the other side had played better", and "players who consistently exhibited outstanding skills, such as leaping high over others to catch the ball, were often praised, but proficiency in the sport gave them no tribal influence". What's the point, you can hear today's results-driven world scoffing. Wills' own story holds up a powerful mirror to the way the world was then. His father and three of his brothers were among 19 colonists killed by Aboriginal people in 1861 in what is now called Queensland - apparently in revenge for the murder of some of their own by a colonist, itself a crime carried out as punishment for an allegation, since disproved, of cattle rustling by indigenous people. Wills was not at the scene of the massacre because his wagon had broken down further afield, but according to some accounts when he returned he was involved in the retributive murders of as many as 370 members of the Gayiri tribe that were committed by police and civilians. A tortured man, Wills descended into alcoholism and ended his life in 1880 by stabbing himself in the heart using a pair of scissors. He was 44. Wills' biographer, Greg de Moore, wrote that he "stands alone in all his absurdity, his cracked egalitarian heroism and his fatal self-destructiveness - the finest cricketer and footballer of the age". The same Wills assembled an all-Aboriginal cricket team that became, in 1868, the first side from the continent that colonists had named Australia to tour England. In a photograph taken in 1866, Wills poses with the Aboriginal team, which he captained and coached. The formal western dress is the first thing that strikes the viewer, followed by the caption: "King Cole, Tarpot, Tom Wills, Johnny Mullagh, Dick-a-Dick, Jellico, Peter, Red Cap, Harry Rose, Bullocky, Cuzens." Even 155 years later, white people still have a problem with names that don't sound like theirs. Behind the gathered men stands a modest wood-and-iron building afforded a verandah not unlike those at the Bourda. The picture was taken nowhere else but at the present day site of the MCG, which had opened 13 years previously. You wonder what Wills might have made of the 93,013 who saw the 2015 World Cup final between Australia and New Zealand, the biggest cricket crowd at the MCG. That might have been surpassed on Sunday had India won their semi-final against England in Adelaide on Thursday. On October 23, the MCG heaved with 90,293 spectators for the match between India and Pakistan. Doubtless the prospect of another clash between cricket's biggest box office teams, and in the final, no less, would have burst previous boundaries. The English will bring considerable support - some of them no doubt dressed as Crusaders, and to hell with the offence that causes - others in the ranks of the Barmy Army. But the English are not Indians; not even close. You hear and feel an India game long before you see it, thanks to the Bharat Army and their dhol drums marking the heartbeat of the modern game. It is a sound as beautiful as it is stirring. If it does not stir you, either to move to its rhythm or just to feel its power, best you check yourself for a pulse. So it will be up to the Pakistanis to bring the party to the MCG, like they did at the SCG on Wednesday for their team's semi-final against New Zealand. Having roared Babar Azam's side to victory, the fans took to the streets outside the ground to celebrate in the rain that had held off until after the match. They were raucous and loud and probably on the edge of what is deemed acceptable in this society of rules upon rules. Mounted police watched from a safe distance, maybe counting how many were being broken. Happily, they did not intervene. As people began peeling off, one man took a solitary route through Moore Park, which borders the SCG. As he walked he waved a large Pakistan flag with strident enthusiasm. There was no-one to see him or his flag in the dark, but he kept it flying with a flourish anyway. Just because he could, you felt. And because he had good reason. And a shining memory. He was somewhere in his 30s, and thus a boy when Pakistan and England came to the MCG to decide who would be champions of the 1992 World Cup. Pakistan, of course, won. One member of their XI, Imran Khan, has since served as his country's prime minister. Last week he survived an apparent assassination attempt. Another, Rameez Raja, is the sitting president of the PCB. The members of England's 1992 team have faded into less prominent lives than that, mostly in media and coaching, while politics in the UK has veered closer to Pakistan's state of instability in the ensuing 30 years. The advent of T20 cricket was still 11 years away in 1992, and the IPL 16 years in the future. So much has changed since then but not this: rain still stops play. It forced the abandonment of three of the four Super 12 games in Melbourne on October 26 and 28 and affected the other. Water was visible in puddles throughout the city on Friday and the Yarra River was fat with fresh rain. The meteorologists say there is a 95% "chance of a thunderstorm, possibly severe" on Sunday, when between 8 and 20mm could fall. Monday's reserve day is scarcely better: also a 95% probability for rain but with 5 to 10mm predicted. Weather woes would indeed be a pity, because even though the MCG is a stadium among stadiums, a massive, uniform concrete, glass and plastic bowl with few distinguishing features, it does not want for atmosphere. What it lacks in memorable architecture it more than makes up for in sheer human spirit, which its cavernous confines distill to a potent elixir. Maybe that's what happens when people are ranged in concentric circles on this scale, like they would have been in the Colosseum. Except that they will bay for runs and wickets on Sunday, but not for blood. And that there will be substantially more of them than the 50,000 or so who could fit into the Roman edifice. More, indeed, than in 82 of Australia's 101 "significant areas by population". That's good, because when the MCG is anything less than half-full it swirls with ghostly echoes and, you have to wish, ghosts themselves. Even with so many in the place, it's hard not to hope men renamed King Cole, Tarpot, Johnny Mullagh, Dick-a-Dick, Jellico, Peter, Red Cap, Harry Rose, Bullocky and Cuzens won't look down from their Sky World on Sunday and see what they helped create. If there is a reason to remember the MCG as a place, it's them.