It’s time to get vaxxed at the ’G

With the MCG empty for a second straight September it is the ideal venue for a vaccination hub.

The absence of another MCG grand final need not be another bleak reminder of what we cannot do.

Again, the big dance will be played elsewhere. Melbourne Demon fans, starved for 57 years, will watch a game played almost 3500kms away.

There will be no mixing of Clydesdales and techno dancers at the grand final parade. None of the carnival splashes of the MCG carpark at the parade’s end, which doubles as the world’s biggest food court.

The MCG would ordinarily buzz with 100,000 stories on September 25, most of them told in the shrieks and roars of those watching the game.

The MCG will miss out on hosting the AFL grand final for a second straight year.

Yes, the usual rituals have been forcibly surrendered again this year. Yet the MCG and the game’s local charms need not languish in COVID-enforced irrelevance.

The MCG could host thousands of stories united by renewal, optimism, and a collective statement in moving beyond the COVID mess.

It is the ideal venue for a vaccination hub in grand final week. People could and should get jabbed at the ground on Football Friday. They could do so knowing that they can make a difference.

The MCG has been repurposed in crisis before. For five years, it hosted no football.

The Royal Exhibition Building in Carlton has been used as a vaccine clinic. Picture Rebecca Michael.

Between 1942-45, the MCG was occupied by 200,000 military personnel, including the US marines who fought at Guadalcanal. Melbourne was labelled the “best liberty port in the world”.

The MCG could reprise that freedom role of 75 years ago. For what better measure of liberty is there than the race to be vaccinated?

What other gesture more directly contributes to the return of the game to its rightful home?

Or signals a desire for something more, when fans can go to the MCG without fear that this most ordinary of Victorian pleasures will not again be lost to crisis?

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