Pleasure Dome

It's not called the Telstra Dome anymore, rather the slightly unsettlingly Ethiad Stadium, evoking as it does some kind of neo-colonial otherness. Wherever the oil-rich Ethiadians live, you can betcha they don't play footy there. No doubt the name will change again, given sport's compromised state when it come to the dollar, so I will keep calling it the Dome (or as my friend has masterfully coined it, the `Dee') until it becomes official again.
I love the majestic MCG, how could you not, it is the eighth- biggest capacity stadium in the world, the beating heart of our city and refurbishments have transformed it into a modern masterpiece of stadium design. But just as I love the transcendent experience of being at one with 60,000 other fans at a footy game under a winter sky at the Gee, I also love the Dome. It is the yin to the Gee's majestic yang. Footy under a closed roof is a different experience but far from an inferior one.
It is the special magic of the enclosed sport stadium, where outside reality is banished, just as it is in the intimacy of a darkened cinema. Under the closed roof, we are physically contained in our shared experience. If what we seek in footy is an escape into the drama and beauty of sport, footy under a closed roof becomes theatre in a way that it does not at the Gee, where on a grey day, with the stands half empty, the energy of the game can drift up and away into the world beyond like a small lost balloon.
Entering the Dome is like walking into a Universal Studio's set of 1940's Hollywood. Lit from above, the emerald turf spreads out like some impossible indoor living carpet, and somehow, just as impossibly, a delicate mist floats over the ground. In the still air, before the match, expectancy is heightened, and without the distractions of weather and other vagaries, watching the game becomes abstracted into pure experience. The emotional connection that we seek with each other, through and with our team, is contained beneath the sheltering sky of the graceful, curved roof and intensified in its floodlit, theatrical space. In a close game, it can sometimes feels as though the roof, powered by pure emotion, might blow clean off and spiral away, like a scene from the Wizard of Oz.
There is consternation that the `greatest home and away game of all time' (round 14 Geelong v St Kilda) has not been moved to the Gee. But I am attending and secretly pleased. I look forward with great pleasure, not just to the prospect of watching my team play in what should be a great game, but also to riding my bike to the Dee down that Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Footscray Rd, where it nestles at the end of it like my very own Emerald City. Once inside, safe from the wintering city outside, I will most certainly feel the love.