It’s impossible to miss the splendor of Sydney even before you step into the city. You get a great view of the city while the flight is about to land in the Sydney Airport, with mountains on one side and the most gorgeous sea on the other.  The city is just as spectacular as the landing prepares you for. In fact, any city which boasts of roadways, railways and seaways for local transport has to be beautiful. But unlike Melbourne, it has the feel of a major city. You see traffic, you see people on the roads – almost as many as some parts of Mumbai, you see queues, and a general sense of vibrancy that grips you.

I often think that a tourist should be the last person one should rely for an informed opinion of any city/place. In fact, after seeing MCG and SCG, I would even wager that a cricket ground in the city gives you a greater sense of the place than some of these ill-formed opinions. SCG is everything that MCG wasn’t. While MCG wasn’t intimidating for a stadium of its magnitude – in fact, from outside it looks extremely simple and small – its opulence can’t be missed. It was a breathtaking yet graceful opulence. SCG is graceful too but in a far more intimate way.

For all the intimacy of the SCG, it’s a bit underwhelming to be out there than watching the ground on TV. The members stand and the ladies pavilion look as picturesque as it does on TV, but the rest of the ground could have been a shot from any other stadium. Also, unlike MCG (it’s incredible that every angle made for a great viewing in such a huge stadium), it has a few spots which clearly make for bad viewing. Towards the Victor Trumper stand, the ground has a fairly big slope and if you are at the ground level, like we were for the first one hour, it’s easier to lose perspective of the action on the field.

Even logistically, SCG is a microcosm of the city itself. There were long queues to get into the stadium; rest rooms were overflowing during the breaks; to get out of the stadium and come back in after the lunch break is a task. It wasn’t inconvenient, certainly not anywhere near the standards of the stadium experiences in India. It’s just the way life in the city is. MCG seems to reflect the more comfortable life of its city where traveling at 80kmph in an 100kmph speed limit road is considered to be serious traffic congestion. MCG had 70k people on the first day of the test but you could have been fooled into believing that there were less than 5k people if you go by how conveniently people got in and out of the stadium. It’s both an engineering and logistical marvel.

MCG is the kind of stadium that you would travel halfway around the world to visit as pilgrimage, while SCG is the one that you would want to have in your city where you watch every alternate match – a bit like MAC in Madras. Oh yeah, a MAC with those picturesque members stand and ladies pavilion.