MELBOURNE, Australia — As Australian pop singer Cody Simpson led a rousing rendition of the Australian national anthem, jets from the United States Marine Corps and Australian Defense Corps flew over the filled-to-the-brim Melbourne Cricket Ground.
This wasn’t any other Friday morning in Australia.
The special-event-like atmosphere at the oval cricket stadium – fit with an NFL field plastered in the middle – for the game between the Rams and the San Francisco 49ers was easy to see, and hear. Henry Romero, a lifelong Rams fan from Riverside, told the Southern California News Group that there was no way he wasn’t going to make the trip for a once-in-a-lifetime experience alongside his family at Melbourne Cricket Ground.
“As soon as I got the email, I told my wife, ‘I’m not getting any younger, we’re going to that game,’” said Romero, a Rams season-ticket holder who spent time in Sydney before arriving in Melbourne on Thursday just like the team. “I booked (the tickets) right away.”
Romero was one of the 100,000-plus fans in a sold-out crowd on Friday morning (Thursday night PT); Australian fans turning in their early-morning wakeups for NFL games for an opportunity to see the first regular-season game in Australia in league history.
Ned and Courtney Kingston, a father and son from Sydney, said they would usually be in their man cave with seven screens on NFL games across the United States on a typical week.
With Ned in his Rams jersey, and Courtney in his 49ers jersey – a family divided by the longtime NFC West rivals making history on Friday – they took the short flight to Melbourne to see their teams live in living color.
For the Kingstons, there was plenty of merchandise available to them to go with day of firsts in Melbourne.
Lines for NFL T-shirts, jerseys and hoodies – along with special merchandise for the Jonas Brothers, who performed a medley of their hits at halftime – snaked outside the front of the stadium.
Both teams held activations across Melbourne – tailgate-like experiences for fans to enjoy in the leadup and following the game. Friday marked the 49ers’ seventh day in Melbourne. The Rams, however, didn’t arrive until Thursday morning – and are set to depart in the hours following the game.
While Friday’s game – televised in the United States as Thursday night football – was a designated home game for the Rams, fit with starting lineup introductions and blue and yellow smoke rising from the roof of the MCG, the energy was notably more 49ers-focused.
Scattered boos whisked across the crowd whenever in-game presenters asked for noise in the Rams’ favor, slightly outweighing the cheers from the home faithful, like Romero who made the trip Down Under.
But on a day like Friday, regardless of the result on the field or the jet-lagged fans fighting their way through a long journey across the Pacific Ocean, Australian football fever was on full display.
GOODELL NOT SURPRISED BY TURNOUT
Roger Goodell said on Netflix’s broadcast that he’s “never met a culture that loves sports more than this.”
“I think we always had a high expectation that this would be successful,” Goodell said. “This exceeded it in every way. Think about this: We’re on Friday at 10:30 in the morning and 100,000 people are going to be in a stadium watching an NFL game. That speaks volumes about the passion of these fans.”
Goodell said the league is probably still several years away from expanding with a permanent international team.
“Our ambition here is to make it a global sport,” Goodell said. “The NFL deserves to be and it’s a great game. We all believe in it passionately. I think our work here is to get to (18) regular-season games, then we’ll be looking for the next stage to grow.”
Goodell ended the interview by wearing a kangaroo-head jacket with an NFL logo.
ICONIC VENUE WITH AN ODD LAYOUT FOR NFL
The Melbourne Cricket Ground has hosted some huge sporting events over its lifetime, but its layout is a little odd for an NFL game.
The playing surface of the MCG – known as The G by many locally – was made mostly for cricket and Australian rules football and constitutes a huge oval that measures 571 feet long by 489 feet wide. That makes the 360-foot-long, 160-foot-wide NFL field look relatively small on television.
It also means that many of the seats that are the most coveted at U.S. venues, like those on the 50-yard line, are much farther away from the action than at most NFL games.
News services contributed to this story.