Haunt of Heroes

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Like a lot of 15-year-old boys, josh Taylor doesn't care for school. "About the only thing I'm interested in," he grumbles, "is sport." Which rather narrowed the field when it came to choosing something for Year 10 work experience. Ideally, he'd have played footy - Australian Rules - like he does for his club on Sunday afternoons. But that wasn't going to happen. So he arranged what he figured was the next best thing: a stint with the Melbourne Cricket Club, which manages the game's grandest stage. It's a Friday morning and Josh is bent over in the middle of the Melbourne Cricket Ground, using a paint-dipped broom to embellish one of the 50-m arcs for tomorrow night's Brisbane vs. Collingwood game. The stands are empty, the wind is numbing and this is painstaking work - not normally the boy's forte. But Josh is content. This place thrills him. Bruce Church has nearly 60 years on Josh, but his feelings for the ground are much the same. Eighteen months ago, adhering to club policy, Church stood down as M.C.C. president when he turned 72. That wound up nearly 25 years' service for the club, and colleagues figured they wouldn't see him anymore. But before long Church was back in his red, white and blue M.C.C. blazer as a volunteer tour guide, showing customers around the stadium that he first visited as a five-year-old. The M.C.G. - or "the G," as locals call it - doesn't look its best right now. The $A430 million redevelopment of the northern side of the ground is in full swing. But between stops to get his breath, Church explains the sights and shares memories with twinkling eyes. "This place has something about it," he says. "The people who work here . . . it just seems to grab them."

The club's 90-odd fulltime staff do seem a happy bunch - and a busy one. As many of them like to tell you, big football games (of which the M.C.G. hosts about 40 each year, as well as international and interstate cricket matches and various other events, all of which bring more than 3 million people through the turnstiles) don't simply happen. They're the culmination of meticulous preparation, about which the average fan has little idea. "A lot of them think it's a case of just flinging open the gates," says event-day office supervisor Gary Walshe, who started working at the ground as a ticket seller in 1977. "But there are people going flat out to get the place ready."

The friendly, round-faced Walshe isn't someone you'll glimpse on one of Church's tours. Based in the bowels of the soon-to-be-demolished Olympic Stand, among shelves full of leather-bound books and a wall of two-way radios, it's Walshe on Monday mornings who activates the M.C.G. machine. The dusty books contain handwritten facts and figures about M.C.G. attendances going back to 1921; Walshe computerized this information during the '90s and continues to update it. By cross-referencing factors such as which teams are playing, their positions on the ladder, whether they're last-start winners and the weather forecast for match day, "We can predict with a reasonable degree of certainty (give or take a couple of thousand people) what the crowd will be for upcoming matches," Walshe says. But he offers more than just a number. He makes projections about patrons' likely arrival times and whether they'll have pre-purchased tickets. Take Richmond, for example, one of the M.C.G.'s four tenant clubs (the others are Hawthorn, Collingwood and Melbourne): they don't have a huge membership, Walshe explains, but when the Tigers start winning their fans turn up in droves to queue for tickets.

Train, tram and bus operators, and hoteliers, will phone Walshe for his estimates, but it's his colleagues in event services who rely on them most. They use them as the basis for decisions on match-day staffing, such as how many of the club's 850 casual workers to call on (around 450 is normal for an average M.C.G. home-and-away crowd of 38,000), and how many to allocate to each of the various roles (ticket selling, spruiking, ushering, supervising). The club's contracted caterer, Spotless, is another interested party: it stocks its outer-ground food outlets according to trusted ratios: 1 in 4 patrons buys a pie; 1 in 5 hot chips; 1 in 10 a hot dog.