The Melbourne Cricket Ground is bathed in sunshine on a September’s day as thousands of fans stream in from all corners.
Fans of one team in red jerseys and the other in blue and gold take your mind back to the Sydney-West Coast AFL grand finals from two decades ago.
Atmospheres such as this is usually only reserved for the likes of the AFL grand final or the Boxing Day Test, but it is very quickly apparent that this is bigger than both.
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It is a Friday morning, and despite it being a sunny September day, the AFL is nowhere to be seen because the National Football League is in town.
If NFL commissioner Roger Goodell had any fears about how the league would be able to fill a 100,000-seat stadium on a Friday morning, scenes from hours before the game would have had him resting easy.
Hours before the game begins, the fact that it was early in the morning did not stop hundreds of fans from getting stuck into drinks at the Pullman Hotel across the road from the MCG, with the positive vibes no doubt welcomed by the same venue recently in the news for all the wrong reasons.
On the drive to the MCG, NFL merchandise stuck out like a sore thumb before the historic venue was even within eyesight.
Melburnians are proud of their city’s reputation as a sporting hub and they were not going to miss this opportunity to show up and show out.
Melbourne’s sports-crazy fans did not waste the opportunity to showcase what a sports-mad town they live in. (Getty Images: Morgan Hancock)
If you were not familiar with the history of the LA Rams and the San Francisco 49ers, this is no ho-hum game of football. These two teams do not like each other.
After making their way through the organised security booths in the Yarra Park precinct, a set-up which meant there were no lengthy queues you’d usually associate with an event of this magnitude, fans wasted little time before slinging barbs between each other.
A group of four Rams fans from Los Angeles described their visit to Australia for the game as “a trip of a lifetime” as they proudly proclaimed the MCG to be “Rams House” for the day.
With these two teams bitter rivals it is unusual to see fans from the different sides fraternising, but that is exactly what one couple travelling from the US has done. The husband, Jamie, is a 49ers fan and the wife, Carmen, is a Rams fan.
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“Typically, hanging out is forbidden in those places, so we thought if we come here it would be okay,” Jamie said pre-game.
However, the fandom wasn’t solely Americans making sojourns Down Under either, with the chance to watch a NFL game in real life a rich reward to Aussie fans who usually toil through all hours of the night just to catch a glimpse of their favourite teams in action.
One such fan, Zac, got into American football through his father who had spent some time in Buffalo, and therefore became a tortured Bills fan.
Zac did not follow in his father’s footsteps and instead followed the Philadelphia Eagles. He was overjoyed at getting a fist pump from Eagles icon Nick Foles who was in Melbourne covering the game for Netflix.
“It’s so weird watching a game at 3am and your team scores and you can’t make any noise in your living room because your entire family is asleep,” he said.
“So it’s just you and your cat watching the TV going, ‘F**k yeah.'”
Fans were given masks to form the flags in the stands. (ABC Sport: Chris De Silva)
He described the experience of watching a regular season NFL game in Melbourne as “surreal”.
“You’re absolutely jazzed and your adrenaline is high, and then half an hour later you’ve got to get up for work on a Monday morning,” Zac said of the usual experience of watching an NFL game played in the US.
As the pre-game festivities got underway there was a real juxtaposition of Australian and American culture.
Indigenous dancers performed a Welcome to Country dance with American breakdancers doing their thing in close proximity.
The juxtaposition of the two cultures was never more evident than when the Shane Warne Stand sign being flanked by LED advertising boards showing the Stars and Stripes from the American flag during Infinity Song’s rendition of The Star Spangled Banner.
There was a real sense of an Australian and American juxtaposition as the Shane Warne Stand sign was surrounded by the US stars and stripes. (ABC Sport: Chris De Silva)
There was just one thing the fans from the two nations agreed upon: booing former Collingwood president Eddie McGuire as he ran out for the coin toss alongside Australian artist G-Flip.
Despite the clash being nominally a Rams home game there was no secret as to who dominated the stands as Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford, the 2025 league MVP, was roundly booed as he ran out with his team amid blue and yellow smoke.
With all the festivities going on it was easy to forget that there was an actual football game to be played. And with the smell of the smoke still in the air, we finally got things underway.
The Rams, who were roundly criticised for not flying to Australia earlier ahead of the game, sleepwalked their way through much of the first quarter until Stafford linked up with star receiver Puka Nacua, who tip-toed his way along the sideline for some solid yardage.
The Los Angeles Rams players ran onto the MCG through a blaze of smoke and received raucous boos from the 49ers-heavy crowd in attendance. (Getty Images: Robert Cianflone)
Nacua’s run meant that teammate Kyren Williams was able to run into the end zone in the opening moments of the second quarter for the historic first-ever NFL touchdown on Australian soil.
Williams’s name will be mentioned in trivia competitions in pubs all around Australia for decades to come.
Despite this being a game between two California-based teams, NFL fans from all corners evidently found their way to the MCG, with just about all of the NFL’s 32 franchises represented in some form in the stands.
As the Rams mariachi band came out during the quarter-time break, three fans wearing a Sam Darnold jersey, a Dak Prescott jersey and a Joe Montana jersey broke out into a salsa.
San Francisco’s Brock Purdy (right) comfortably won the battle of quarterbacks, with his highlight of the day a 39-yard touchdown pass that put the 49ers ahead. (Getty Images: Robert Cianflone)
While much is made of American sport’s half-time shows, the entertainment began well before the Jonas Brothers took centre stage.
Along with the mariachi band there was a separate band with a small stage set up near the usual AFL interchange benches, breaking into varying covers of classic hits such as Bryan Adams’s Summer of 69.
With NFL games taking over three hours of actual time there is an emphasis on keeping the fans engaged throughout, especially during stoppages.
Fans were asked to vote for which song they wanted to sing in unison and unpredictably picked Daryl Braithwaite’s Horses, which might as well be Australia’s other national anthem at this point.
NFL MVP Matthew Stafford had his work cut out for him at the MCG. (Getty Images: Quinn Rooney)
As 100,021 fans later broke out into a passionate rendition of Horses there was something indescribably magical about it.
With the big show in town, Australia’s footy stars that usually aren’t able to get a moment of breathing room in Melbourne were able to slip into relative obscurity.
A current and former St Kilda cohort of Rowan Marshall, Jack Steele and Luke Dunstan were packed in among fans sitting in the fourth tier of the MCG, all decked out in Rams gear.
Despite proclamations of the MCG being Rams House, the home side gradually found themselves in trouble after Williams’s opening touchdown.
Fred Warner (pictured) and the 49ers had the last laugh after making the most of their Melbourne trip. (Getty Images: Quinn Rooney)
An incredible goal-line stop from the 49ers defence denied a Stafford tush-push at the very end of the third quarter.
It was the kind of stop you would expect from the Rams’s star-studded defence of Myles Garrett and the recently unretired Aaron Donald, and it became very obvious that this would not be the day the Rams would remember fondly.
A touchdown from Deebo Samuel sent the 49ers into raptures once again and the underdogs had claimed a dream start to their season, downing their more-favoured rivals 27-7 despite a 12,640-kilometre road trip.
The 49ers had arrived and well and truly ransacked Rams House and run away with the chocolates.
The NFL came, it saw, and it well and truly conquered Melbourne.