akoo

About 7 years ago per capita consumption of beer in Russia has finally outnumbered per capita consumption of vodka. I mean a comparison done in actual litres consumed, not in pure alcohol equivalent...

I am amazed that you refer to ~40 thousand people as a "small" crowd for the regular season game... With so many AFL teams in Melbourne area you still have huge crowds on many games. This is something you should be very proud of! Many Russians think that rugby union is the most popular spectator sport in Australia. That's because they don't know anything about other Australian ball sports. They are terribly wrong. I guess that AFL, NRL, cricket and even soccer outperform Rugby Union Super League in terms of spectators. The AFL/NRL regional divide is also very unique, you don't see this happening in other countries. I wonder what could have happened if you had just one ball game in Australia. Then you would have to build grounds twice as large as MCG... Amazing how relatively small Australian population is able to keep going so many ball sports!

Moonshadow, I don't want to abuse Club's kind desire to help us out, but thank you anyway for suggestion :-)

small but forward, bolshoe spasibo! :-)

Looks like a great plan, thanks!

Jaded, thank you for your kind words! As the Club gives us free GA tickets, we will spend this money for their benefit on some Club related souvenirs. And we promise to cheer for Demons! Moving between different general admission areas seems like a fun thing to do. If we are high above in Level 3, can we have a feel of the actual game or is it more like watching down from the skyscraper, where people look like small ants?...

Daniel, thank you! How does that upgrade work? We buy 2 GA tickets and with your upgrade we go to the reserved seats at Level 2? What's the cost of this upgrade?

If we have General Admission tickets, can we move between different GA areas? For example, sere first half high above in the Wing (Level 3, or Level 2 if available), and then see the second half behind the goals with more passionate supporters? In many soccer stadiums in Russia and Europe that would not be possible, as they have different entrance gates for different areas of the stadium, and you can't move between them.

Hi again! First of all thank you for your compliment regarding my English. In fact I learned English a lot at school, and I use it extensively for my job. If someone lives so far away from Russia, it may seem to him that all Russian population is involved in hacking, corruption, and espionage. You know what, fortunately there are quite a few people here doing other (completely legal) things for living :-) I see nothing wrong if I want to take my family for a vacation to Australia. This is exciting for us, and this is good for the Australian economy. Your country is expensive for visitors, but we want to give it a try anyway, as it looks very different from the other places. We will be visiting Melbourne, Sydney and Port Douglas / Cairns areas. Bu the way, last night I met an Australian fan on a Confederations Cup soccer game between Chile and Cameroon in Moscow. He is heading to Sochi today where your team plays Germany. We had a nice talk and exchanged advices on our travel between our countries. I visited England many times, that’s where I got my love to cricket and rugby. Since I follow cricket, I definitely know MCG, and also SCG, Gabba, Waca. Now you see why it was not difficult for me to learn how the AFL ticketing works, and what different levels are there at MCG. My email to the Melbourne FC was answered extremely quickly. They were so kind to offer my family free General Admission tickets to the game! This is something completely unexpected and very welcoming from them! I am surprised that they are willing just give away tickets to the foreigners. They also mentioned that Level 2 Wing area is reserved for members, but more tickets should be available at Ticketek closer to the game.

Thanks, I will do as you suggest. There are four of us: my wife, children 16 and 13 years old, and me.

Probably I could have used more neutral "Foreign visitors" instead of "Visitors from Russia" in the title :-)

deanox, thanks! i understand there is a compromise between overall game view, being close to players and cheering with fans.

daisycutter, thanks! What do you mean by contacting the club directly? Do they sell tickets via some other site and have different options compared to Ticketek?

Hello, In August we are going down under to discover Australia. We are staying in Melbourne for 5 nights. As we are crazy about all kinds of sports, one of the must-to-do things is visiting the iconic MCG. There is a game between Melbourne and St Kilda on August 13. We watched several AFL games on TV, know a bit of rules, and really look forward to this experience. I am quite confused on how the ticketing works for AFL matches. Ticketek is now selling seats in public reserve for this particular game, but I cannot choose a specific section or specific seats. It seems that they open only one section in each price category at once and go to another section only after the other one is full. My understanding is that this is not one of the biggest AFL games, so there should be no problems getting the tickets, taking into account the jumbo size of MCG. I also read that for the first time visitors at MCG best seats are in Level 2 Wing. Please explain if I should buy my tickets right now, wait for some more time and buy better reserved seats or just go with general seating. We don’t want to travel half of the world to end up in Level 4. Thank you!